gDoc

The newly created UK chapter of the PDF/A Competence Centre is announcing their presence with a seminar in London this Friday. There are speakers from Crawford Technologies, Luratech, Callas and the main PDF/A Competence Centre itself … oh yes, and me!

The seminar will look in detail at:

• What is the PDF/A standard and how is it used?

• What are the benefits of PDF/A?

• Which documents can be archived into PDF/A?

• What do PDF/A, PDF / A – 1a, PDF/A – 1b, PDF 2 mean?

It’s being held on Nov 19, 2010 from 1:00 PM – 5:00 PM at:

Hubworking Centre
5 Wormwood Street
London, London EC2M 1RQ

For more details, or to book attendance, see the event web site.

See you there!

Martin

Congratulations to Cem Kaymaz-Yildiz and Jason Inge for their funny and accurate video of how gDoc Fusion works.   

Over the summer, we completed a competition called Viral Summer which encouraged students within Hertfordshire, Cambridgeshire, Northamptonshire and Bedfordshire to complete a short digital video which promotes the unique aspects of gDoc Fusion. 

The result is a funny and unique take on our product, gDoc Fusion, and we think you’ll enjoy it too. 

You can take a look for yourself : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=alYq363S-fE

The recent release of the Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) beta has got me excited, not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, the HTML 5 support is decidedly funky (check out http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/performance/psychedelicbrowsing/Default.html) but what I like is the new printing architecture. (I’m boring like that.) To quote the IE9 blurb:

“To do high quality printing of HTML5, you need a high quality print subsystem. Internet Explorer 9 directly converts web content into XPS format when sending output to the printing system. XPS is a more modern print system with native support for features such as opacity and complex paths, which results in increased fidelity and quality when printing modern web content.” 

What is often overlooked is that XPS is not just an electronic document format like PDF. As part of the XPSDRV (the printing architecture of Windows Vista and Windows 7) it is also a spool format and a page description language. When an application uses the XPS Print Path rather than GDI, the new print path maintains the XPS format from application publication to the final processing in the print driver. This streamlined printing process is quicker and does not suffer from the degradation in quality that can be a feature of older print paths. Windows 7 also expands the range of applications that can take advantage of XPS printing.

So why do I care about this? The answer is that XPS plays an important role in our free PDF creation product. We switched from PostScript-based generation to one based on XPS in the last release. For most applications printing to our virtual driver, the switch is largely irrelevant, but some, including Microsoft Office 2007 / 2010, definitely benefit. The real advantage comes when an application uses XPS from the start to do its printing. A good example is Microsoft Publisher 2010 which uses XPS printing to guarantee print quality and colour fidelity, crucial factors in publishing.  With IE9 we are seeing a mainstream application taking this advantage, as in time more applications will do.

Back to work then looking at IE9, and I’ve just discovered this:  http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/Helicopter/Default.xhtml. Simple but addictive!