Lori DeFurio

Lori shares Acrobat news, updates, tips and tricks.

The Acrobat 8 ACE exam is now available. For Acrobat 7 we offered two exams (Print Production and LiveCycle Designer), however, we now consolidated into one Acrobat 8 test. There will be a recertification exam (testing on just the new features, via the internet) in a few weeks, and the full exam is now available at testing centers.
For more information see – http://www.adobe.com/support/certification/ace.html.
The exam prep guide hasn’t yet been posted yet on Adobe.com so I’ve attached a copy here.
Good Luck – and let me know if you’re Certified on Acrobat 8 – I’ll promote it here.

Today marks the one year anniversary for AcrobatUsers.com. If you haven’t had the chance to visit yet – please stop by. If you’ve been following us this year – we appreciate the support. We have over 10, 000 registered members, 18 chapters, and lots of new functionality introduced in recent months. I appreciate the tireless efforts of our bloggers and “Ask the Expert” contributors.
My personal goal for 2007 is to have a portal for Acrobat Connect users and content localized for non-English speaking members.
Happy Birthday AcrobatUsers.com
(and Happy Valentine’s Day to each of you)

The 2nd annual PDF University will be held in Miami Beach Feb 28 – Mar 3. I’ll be there to present in the track PDF for Document Publishing. I will focus on what’s new in Acrobat 8 as it relates to a business user.

To kick off this track, I’m hosting an Adobe User Group breakfast (full breakfast – not just danish) at the convention center @ 7:30 am on March 2nd. Registration and Room Location to follow. With the co-location of The Creative Suite Conference, I expect we’ll get folks from the InDesign crowd as well.

As always, we’ll give an update on what’s happening at Adobe, answer lots of questions, and of course, raffle off some fun gifts.

I’m so excited about our announcement earlier today. In case you didn’t see the Press Release, Adobe has offered up the PDF specification (version 1.7) to the International Standards Organization (ISO). AIIM will be the facilitator.

As a long time Acrobat and PDF user and evangelist, this news and decision by our executive team will ensure a long-lasting PDF community within government, education, and business organizations world-wide. It is clearly the next logical step for PDF as a standard. ISO has already ratified PDF/X and PDF/A, with PDF/E just around the corner.

Leonard Rosenthol, Technical Standards Evangelist at Adobe has prepared an excellent outline of the history of PDF as an open technology on his blog

We have an FAQ posted, but please feel free to comment here if you have questions about the announcement.

If you want to chat in person, I’m aware of the following events this week:
- Joel Geraci, who has taken over for me as Acrobat/PDF Technical Evangelist, is at the Lyra Symposium.
- Rick Borstein, the voice behind the Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog , is at LegalTech.
- I’ll be at Smart Geometry Workshop & Conference in NYC.

I’m happy to announce that we have just posted an update to Adobe Acrobat 3D. This free update includes several Dynamic Link Libraries (DLL) that provide support for more recent versions of CAD file formats for Adobe Acrobat 3D and the 3D Toolkit. The list of new and updated file formats can be found in the press release and at the download site. Most of the filters have been updated to include the latest versions of popular CAD packages.

And if you don’t have Acrobat 3D and want to try it – please visit the trial download page. Note: after you install the trial you will need to add the patch mentioned above to ensure you have the updated filters. Also, if you want more information on Acrobat 3D you can visit the Acrobat 3D Corner on AcrobatUsers.com

I’m excited to let you know that Adobe has a multi-city (12) tour starting next week dedicated to educating attendees on Acrobat Connect Professional. The sessions are 9:00 – 12:00 (registration begins at 8:30 am).

I’ve been using Acrobat Connect Professional (formerly known as Macromedia Breeze) since the companies came together and I’ve found that as a world traveler, I love the fact that I can hold a meeting, show a demo, or just share my desktop from anywhere to anyone.

I encourage you to attend one of these events if you can – and if not, there are online seminars as an alternative.

And if you do attend – I would love to hear how your experience was. Did you learn something new? Do you think you’ll use the technology?

I’m happy to report that Quite Software just released updated versions of all of their Acrobat plug-ins for full Acrobat 8 compatibility (including Universal Binary for Macintosh). That’s one week from product release. I think this is a record. Check out the updated plug-ins here.

After my first post – I was gently reminded that other announced their plug-in support as well this week:

I’m happy to announce a new contest for our Adobe developer community. This contest is for Sync SWF – the very cool SDK for Breeze Meeting. This is an excellent opportunity for Flash developers to build collaborative Flash applications offering an entirely new channel where the Flash development community can profit from — the rapidly growing number of Breeze customers. So what is a “collaborative Flash application” – well, basically with a Sync SWF application, when someone in the meeting room changes something in the Flash app, everyone else in the meeting room can see what they have changed in real time. All meeting participants are synced up with the state of the Flash application.

Using the new Breeze Exchange, a developer can post and charge for custom Flash applications that Breeze end users can download and use in their everyday jobs. To celebrate this exciting news we are running a contest in which four (4) $5,000USD prizes will be awarded.

Please see http://www.adobe.com/devnet/breeze/articles/sync_swf_contest.html for full contest details.

Although – the webpages don’t say this yet…. We will be announcing the winners at Adobe MAX in October.

You might think What the heck is the Flex Developer Derby? – it is a contest hosted by Adobe, to uncover/identify/discover great applications developed with Adobe Flex 2.

The basics:
- Applications must be developed using Adobe Flex 2. Click here to download it.
- Contest will close on June 30, 2006. All submissions must be received by this date.
- Six winners will each receive a 42-inch Samsung Plasma TV plus a Microsoft Xbox 360. (Hey – if I knew Flex, I’d enter the contest myself to win these gifts for my son, who is enjoying himself — a bit too much for my taste — in college!)
- Contest entries must be submitted to http://labs.adobe.com/showcase/special/flexderby/ (also – all the small print required by US Law is available there as well)

Good Luck and I hope that one of our Acrobat/PDF developers is a winner!

Mike Potter has mentioned this seminar in his blog- but I wanted to ensure the Acrobat community was equally aware of this virtual meeting (using Breeze) to outline the 7.1 changes.

The session will start at 12:00 Noon ET tomorrow and last between 60 and 90 minutes. URL: adobe.breezecentral.com/r90735129/. If you are unable to attend live, we will be creating a recording of the session as well.