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To: tbancroft who wrote (26583)	6/20/2000 3:26:00 PM
From: LindyBill	Respond to of 54805

should therefore, as Verizon Wireless, have the ability to continue to offer service in the areas. Am I reading this wrong? I can't answer that. I don't think so, but I could be wrong.

To: tbancroft who wrote (26583)	6/20/2000 3:37:00 PM
From: wopr1	Respond to of 54805

Adoption of the PDF format: Interesting article on the adoption of the PDF format. Look how this standard has taken 10 years to be fully adopted. news.excite.com Channeling the PDF explosion Updated 2:54 PM ET June 20, 2000 by Andreas Pfeiffer, the Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies From prepress to document exchange to Mac OS X, Adobe's file format has diversified rapidly. Now, how are developers and users to make sense of its many forms? In the many years that Adobe Systems Inc.'s Portable Document Format has been with us, it has made impressive inroads in a markets ranging from corporate document management to eBooks to prepress. PDF is widely viewed as a standard that has either already taken over its market segment or is ready to do so. Thanks to its extensible architecture and flurry of third-party tools, PDF is also well-supported and integrated in vertical market solutions. No problem, right? It depends on whether you know which PDF you're talking about. Since its appearance a decade ago, PDF has grown and diversified far beyond its simple origins as a medium document exchange. In the prepress market, for instance, the file format is viewed by many users as the most viable answer to proprietary data structures; however, prepress wasn't even on Adobe's initial road map for Acrobat. The requirements of PDF-based corporate data management are so substantially different from those of your printer, it's surprising that we are still talking about the same basic technology. (It also goes a long way toward showing the technology's huge potential.) PDF fluorescence By now, we have several versions of the file format, with more in the pipeline. The latest version of Acrobat uses PDF 1.3; the previous (and still widely used) version used the 1.2 definition of the file format. And this is without taking in account PDF/X, a graphic arts-specific, standardized version developed by the Committee for Graphic Arts Technical Standards (CGATS). The main aim of PDF/X is to focus PDF on the needs of the print world, to ensure trouble-free output of PDF files. So where is PDF headed? Adobe of course, continues to shape the technical specifications of the standard in its own image. Since Illustrator 9 supports transparency, for instance, it is likely that this capability will eventually be included in the PDF format in the future. For the inventor of the format, PDF is indeed a clearly defined standard, but it is also one that continues to evolve quite rapidly. There are technical issues associated with this evolution. Font encoding, for instance, has evolved dramatically since the first version of the file format; it is now fully unicode-compliant and handles double-byte fonts. The result: Although viewing a file is no problem (provided you have Version 4.0 of Acrobat Reader), editing is becoming a headache, since many applications capable of handling PDF files can't work withdouble-byte typefaces. The Mac OS X angle Among PDF's most notable third-party adopters is Apple computer Inc., which has adopted PDF as the default file format for storing graphics within its forthcoming Mac OS X. This is a bold and potentially very intelligent move for the market leader in publishing and graphic arts. For the time being, however, it's not quite clear how Apple will implement PDF. What is known is that Apple intends to provide basic PDF capabilities built on the published specifications of the PDF 1.2 file format and that the company counts on third-party developers to extend this architecture to cover vertical market segments. It will take some time before Mac OS X has significant market share; it won't ship until early next year, and even then it will take some time for the market to move. Nevertheless, Apple's endorsement is likely to propel PDF into new reaches of the market. Sorting it out What's the upshot of all this diversification. Simply put. the standard needs a standard -- or, more precisely,several standards. It's fairly safe to assume that the current implementation of PDF has stretched as far as it can. Now it is time for each market segment to push the implementation or version that makes sense. That's already starting to happen. In several local markets, such as Norway, PDF is already heavily used in prepress workflows, thanks mostly to the intelligent use of add-on products that tame the snarls even plain-vanilla PDF occasionally encounters. Adobe has created a technology far more pervasive than the company originally envisioned. Whether it ultimately succeeds in its new channels depends on creative collaboration between Adobe and committed specialists in third-party markets. Andreas Pfeiffer is an industry analyst and editor in chief of the Pfeiffer Report on Emerging Trends and Technologies. -wopr