Talking Points: These are some of the things that Nuance PDF Converter 6 Professional and Enterprise cannot do or work with correctly:Reader enablementCreate custom / branded PDF Portfolios – only Basic Grid as with Acrobat Standard (PDFC6 can display most PDF Portfolios, but not as reliably as Acrobat or Reader 9)Embedded Flash content (aka embedded rich media such as the Flex Chart example) Distribute, track and collect PDF forms (ad-hoc workflow and when integrated with LiveCycle solutions) Links are provided to actual Nuance support knowledgebase articles proving how this software cannot work with all PDF document types:Unable to open documents secured using LCRM-protected files Nuance PDF Converter 6 Professional and Enterprise can convert source documents to PDF/A, but testing shows this is not necessarily ISO-compliant PDF/A. There is no way to verify that a document conforms with the specification with this software. It is not a PDF/A conformant viewing application. Nuance PDF Converter Professional 6 can created Tagged PDF, but it does not meet the needs of accessibility guidelines such Section 508 in the United States. There are too few tools to modify or correct for accessibility, and there are no verification tools.Note to presenter: More detailed information on many Acrobat and PDF clones can be found at https://zerowing.corp.adobe.com/display/acrobatcompetition, http://blogbox.can.adobe.com/acrobatcompetition, and http://icomm.corp.adobe.com/Infield/Products/AcrobatFamily.aspx, and use the presentation linked on the next slide entitled “Details Matter: Why Do I Need Adobe Acrobat 9?”
Talking Points: These are some of the things that Nuance PDF Converter 6 Professional and Enterprise cannot do or work with correctly:Reader enablementCreate custom / branded PDF Portfolios – only Basic Grid as with Acrobat Standard (PDFC6 can display most PDF Portfolios, but not as reliably as Acrobat or Reader 9)Embedded Flash content (aka embedded rich media such as the Flex Chart example) Distribute, track and collect PDF forms (ad-hoc workflow and when integrated with LiveCycle solutions) Links are provided to actual Nuance support knowledgebase articles proving how this software cannot work with all PDF document types:Unable to open documents secured using LCRM-protected files Nuance PDF Converter 6 Professional and Enterprise can convert source documents to PDF/A, but testing shows this is not necessarily ISO-compliant PDF/A. There is no way to verify that a document conforms with the specification with this software. It is not a PDF/A conformant viewing application. Nuance PDF Converter Professional 6 can created Tagged PDF, but it does not meet the needs of accessibility guidelines such Section 508 in the United States. There are too few tools to modify or correct for accessibility, and there are no verification tools.Note to presenter: More detailed information on many Acrobat and PDF clones can be found at https://zerowing.corp.adobe.com/display/acrobatcompetition, http://blogbox.can.adobe.com/acrobatcompetition, and http://icomm.corp.adobe.com/Infield/Products/AcrobatFamily.aspx, and use the presentation linked on the next slide entitled “Details Matter: Why Do I Need Adobe Acrobat 9?”
RickThanks, Mark. Oh, how I loath sharing these eye charts, but I need to tell you what is allowed and not allowed in the various flavors of PDF/A.So, starting at the left side of the chart, we have PDF/A-1A and PDF/A-1B which are the original PDF/A Flavors. You’ll notice that the first line in the chart is version compatibility. That can be a little confusing, it least it was to me.MarkThat doesn’t sound that confusing to me. It’s the version of the PDF file, right?RickNo, not exactly, and that’s what confused me. Version Compatibility means that the file doesn’t have any features newer that those included in Acrobat 5. It doesn’t actually mean that the file has to be a PDF 1.4 file. You could have a valid, PDF/A-1 file that is, in fact, a PDF 1.5 file or later. How weird is that?MarkPlenty weird, if you ask me.RickNow, the PDF/A-2 flavors are were just ratified in October of last year and they are based on ISO-32000 the Acrobat 8 specification.There are a number of advantages to having PDF . . . Really any PDF, based on newer specifications. ISO-32000 compresses everything in the document stream and that results in smaller documents. All versions of PDF/A require all of the fonts to be embedded. We’ll cover how to do this during the demonstration.One aspect of the PDF/A is that the documents must be self-contained with no reliance on external players. For that reason, multimedia– such as movies and sounds– is not allowed.Since archives should not be changed, JavaScript or any other dynamic element is Verboden. Here’s another prohibition No encryption allowed. MarkWell, that seems pretty obvious, After all, what good is your important document fifty years from now if you’ve forgotten the Open password?RickGood point. Now, we are going to talk about some of the differences between PDF/A flavors. Using Acrobat, you can embed a file into a PDF. That’s not allowed in the the PDF/A-1 flavors. In PDF/A-2, you can embed files as long as the embedded files are PDF/A also.Another difference is in the area of transparency. ISO 32000 PDFs support transparency which is important in print workflows and even for preserving fidelity of PowerPoint presentations.Accessibility and tagging is another area where there are differences. Mark, you’re always good at explaining that . . .MarkA tagged or accessible PDF has structural information in it so that people who are visually impaired can use them with screen reading software on their computer. For example, let’s say you had a three PDF page with three columns. By “tagging” the document, the screen reading software knows how to read column 1, followed by column 2, followed by column three. RickAnother difference between the various flavors is the requirement for searchable Unicode text. Unicode simply means that you can have a large number of different characters to support many different languages. A PDF you generate from Word would meet that requirement. But, what about a scanned image of, say, a paper memo? MarkWell, you could OCR the document in Acrobat to make it searchable.RickRight, you could. This is an interesting change that the PDF/A committee made when they rolled out PDF/A-2. One thing they recognized is that they didn’t have a standard for searchable, scanned documents. Searchable text is Optioneel with PDF/A-1B and, for reasons we will see later, it can be really challenging to take paper documents and make them accessible. So, we now have PDF/A-2U which requires searchable text, but does not have to be tagged.Finally– and I can hear our legal customers on the call getting restless– is the way that PDF/A deals with metadata. Metadata is information about a file such as title, subject, author, etc. Metadata could also be information about a element inside the file . . . For example, the metadata attached to a photo from a digital camera. Metadata is always Optioneel in PDF/A, but is recommended. One difference in PDF/A-2 is that object metadata is supported.
