Acrobat PDF future after Adobe-Macromedia Wedding

PDF developers Tim Sullivan of ActivePDF and Chris Pieper of FormRouter Inc. discuss the future for PDF and Acrobat after the Adobe-Macromedia merger.

Better Web deployment of PDFs. Adobe engineers will get to go “under the hood” and better natively integrate PDF and HTML together in Dreamweaver and make them more complementary technologies instead of the rivals they seem to be now, especially in the world of forms.

Flash and PDF working together in Acrobat forms. Flash videos could explain how to fill out complicated PDF forms, or even spur real-time interaction between the form user and host servers. PDF rendering engine and digital signatures technology could be built into Flash and make it more useful, too. PDF could get a nice boost if Adobe builds into PDF Flash’s “dynamic updating” of a document from external data sources.

Individuals getting more love from Adobe. The “enterprise mentality” of Adobe pushing large Acrobat installations into corporate and governmental environments will be now augmented by Macromedia’s tele-sales expertise, Pieper said. That means Adobe will be better equipped to deal with individual users.

Adobe wasn’t part of the session, as federal regulations barred company representatives’ public comment on the deal at that time.