- The Race to Rich-Media Domination
- Adobe Steps into the Interactive Arena
- Adobe's Mission: One Application for Print and Interactivity
- Adobe Redefines the Office Workflow
- Page-Based vs. Timeline Formats
- The Cost of Playback
- Adobe Introduces Reader 5.1
- Multimedia Moves to the Web Page
- Acrobat's Best Friend: Adobe InDesign
- InDesign Gets Interactive
- A Polarized New-Media Industry
- Rich-Media PDF and Disruptive Technologies
- Building a Team That Includes Everyone
- Reader 8 (PDF 1.7)
- Commenting and Forms
- Attached Files
- Viewing Interactive 3D Rich Media
- Adobe and Macromedia
Adobe Redefines the Office Workflow
Although rich-media developers turned away from the PDF format, Adobe kept refining its own version of JavaScript just for PDF to make it much more robust for multimedia and, specifically, for the interactive forms widely used by the business community. Many types of PDF forms could be downloaded, filled out offline, and submitted to a database.
Promoting PDF as a paperless office solution was paying off handsomely for Adobe, its third-party PDF application developers and the JavaScript developer community. Adobe was making millions of dollars creating enterprise systems for the financial community, and it was working frantically to stay ahead of the competition by refining its interactive forms using JavaScript, XML, and updated PDF libraries.
Adobe continuously improved the functionality and security of the PDF specification. Unfortunately, in some of the versions that were released, Adobe altered the JavaScript calls to provide improved security, and sometimes the new versions of the documents were not compatible with previous versions of Reader. So unless the home user upgraded to the latest free version of Reader, some interactivity in certain PDF documents would not work. Adobe is very concerned about the security of its PDF file format and goes to great lengths to ensure that viruses do not plague PDF files.