The Acrobat.com Blog: Two Vignettes

September 3, 2007

Two Vignettes

Posted by Tad Staley at 7:20 AM

Happy Labor Day everyone. Here’s a pair of vignettes from our signup stories. The first, from John Burland (who did a nice write-up of Buzzword on his blog, You Must Be From Away), provides a shining example of off-beat native New Zealand humor:

I was orphaned at an early age (my grandparents - childless, unfortunately - went down with the Titanic.)

Is that good enough? No?

OK, read about Buzzword on Wired, need desperately something that’s as good as this and I PROMISE that I’ll tell all the others in my geriatrics water polo group, all of whom appear to be early adopters of cutting-edge technology. We all have laptop cradles on our Zimmer-frames.

The second story, from Joe Cardella, explains a typical use case for a web-based word processor. The second paragraph points to areas where Buzzword goes beyond current online offerings:

I am a daily user of Google Docs for work and, more extensively, school. I am a commuter student, and frequently work both at home and on campus, and having a web-based solution is a big help because I work on multiple computers and don’t have to worry about synchronizing my files between systems. I am an English major in creative writing, so I spend a lot of time writing critical analyses, fiction, poetry, and screenplays.

My biggest problems with Google Docs is some inconsistency in the behavior of text formatting tools between browsers (I also frequently switch between Firefox on Windows, Firefox on Mac, and Safari on Mac). Also, the lack of some of the other standard formatting options, like margins, headers and footers is a hindrance. I typically need to export the Google Docs to Word so I can add some required document styling, like headers and footers, page numbering, etc, once my document is completed.

Finally… September has arrived, and Buzzword is edging closer to a more public release. Stay tuned to this space over the coming weeks and beyond - we’ll discuss some new functionality that is almost ready to be deployed (e.g. spell check), and some details to share about our plans for unveiling the first real word processor on the web.