Moving into the second decade of Acrobat, PDFzone's Champions of PDF series yields the stage to the most influential people in the PDF world: developers, educators, consultants and visionaries. This series will touch not only on the history of Acrobat and how it evolved into its present state, but also on what the future holds for this versatile publishing tool.

This installment of the series features Michael Jahn, the free-agent evangelist who has hit a thousand publishing trade shows touting the use of PDF on behalf of the printing industry, Agfa, Enfocus and other companies. Many PDFzone site visitors will recognize him from his frequent posts in our forums . His lively, sometimes-cynical humor is always refreshing, and his depth of knowledge--and love--of all things PDF are virtually unrivalled anywhere on the industry’s landscape. Currently, he splits his time working for PC Mall and Dynamic Graphics Magazine .

PDFzone: So how did you get started with PDF in the early to mid 1990s?

Michael Jahn: It was all up to one particular project, for one customer, JCPenney, and one person, Michael Shea of Shea Communications, who had just bought an offset facility and a gravure facility and was trying to figure out how he could make one workflow work for both. We used Type 4 inks for gravure and SWOP inks on offset, and the recipe for color was different on both systems. We wanted the model wearing that light peach outfit to look right on both. They used to send us cases and cases of clothes--and we needed to match colors because guess what? When somebody buys it out of the catalog they want to not be surprised when it shows up. We had this issue of not deviating from what was on the transparency--and I was brought on board for the color part of it, and the colors had to match whether we were doing a small run of a catalog or a large run of a newspaper insert.

JCPenney was looking at buying a large system that would make the files ready for us to engrave cylinders and output film. They were looking at Hell, Crosfield, and Scitex; they all exported something that was similar, but yet different (from one another). There was no standard because they all competed and had this idea that theirs was best.

Around that time, a guy named Frank Scott, who worked at Time magazine, had this problem: He was in the middle of this workflow where advertisers were sending data, and printers wanted him to guarantee he wasn't sending junk even though he didn’t make it. He advocated TIFF/IT. The problem was, by the time TIFF/IT got done with all the politics of all the companies--companies supported it but badly, it was slow, everybody who tried to use it thought it was terrible.

This guy at JCPenney wanted to send us PostScript files. He was working with us and 10 other printers who printed it regionally. They were TAR PostScript files in Unix made from their own desktop publishing system that looked like Quark on a DEC (machine). I tried to test-output one of these to film and it made like 17 pieces of film. Imagine if a word went at an angle across a cyan object... every time it made another color it made another piece of film.

I decided to try running this platform-dependent PostScript through Distiller, and it was perfect. Exactly what I needed it to be. Working with Jim Meehan and Gary Cosimini at Adobe, they helped me write a little piece of PostScript that went into a folder that Distiller saw and set Distiller up. I knew a little PostScript at the time, that's why they’d even talk to me. They helped me, and there it was.

I spoke at the Gravure Association of America show explaining why I didn't like TIFF/IT. I was definitely the odd man out. People screamed and yelled that it was proprietary, Adobe's "domain," and how CT line work was the standard. People didn't understand that it didn't have anything to do with any of that. It had to do with the end user being able to generate something they could give to somebody else, and they could depend on it.

PDFzone: Fast-forward. How did you get involved with Agfa?

Jahn: Agfa saw that I was able to convince printers, in a very passionate way, that our systems were broken: They were proprietary. Customers were going to do their own digital photography, their own scanning, there wasn’t going to be this prepress moment between customer and printer.

(I’m still not right on that. There still are prepress companies. But they have diminished significantly. Back when I was in the business, we would charge $3,800 for a page to make a set of films. A blank page with nothing on it. The rate went up from there.)

They said "you’re an evangelist, no one can argue with you." And I ended up doing that for about four years.

PDFzone: Is JDF a true revolution--or just an incremental publishing technology upgrade that’s masquerading as one?

Jahn: It is a revolution internal to the vendors. I think the switch between TIFF/IT and PDF was more like changing from the horse to the car, and JDF is everyone agreeing on how to move the rearview mirrors and make windshield wipers work.

Like, I could make a phone and you could make a charger and they would work. It’s crazy wonderful for the vendors. But to the end users, they don’t care. It’s not so apparent to them... and it shouldn’t be.

PDFzone: You inserted yourself in the debate about whether or not prepress-worthy PDFs can be made in the Mac OS, and proved an X-3 file could be made without Acrobat or any other applications. It's not an easy thing to do, but now people just might try it at home. Moving out of the theoretical and into the business model--will anyone actually do this? Do printers need to learn how to deal with this now that Pandora’s box is open?

Jahn: I think we’re already there. More and more of these documents are coming from less and less controlled environments. Normal people--not just early adopters--with the computers they have, whether they’re Macs or PCs, are coming to printers and saying, “Here's my document. Process it. Print it. Make it look like it looked on my computer.”

Imagine that. The Macintosh is exporting a standard file. It’s the first time we saw that. This is Apple addressing the fact that we’re going to exchange documents and they will support an ISO, ANSI standard. It’s huge. It’s monstrous. It’s amazing they had people on board who cared. They want to make it easy for us to exchange color documents reliably. That is value added. That perhaps is the reason you’d pick a Macintosh. It just comes with the box. It burns DVDs, for crying out loud. Microsoft is iBusiness, Apple is iLife.

Once you’re in that position, it’s that way. People like it. The printers can say “I can’t do business with you.” But when the customers get frustrated, the vendors will have to step up, just like they did with JDF.

PDFzone: Gaze into your crystal ball. What's next for PDF?

Jahn: I still participate in forums, discussing little details like “I can’t communicate a duotone,” or “my PDF doesn’t display right.” Implementing color management is still a little complicated.

I know this sounds bizarre coming from somebody like me, but we’re still in the early adopter stage. It’s not ubiquitous. My mom doesn't use PDF every day, but she definitely uses the bank every day. I think when it comes to exchanging digital documents, the jury’s still out. In the medical community, they still exchange PowerPoint files, that’s the standard--because the computers they have already have PowerPoint installed, so creating and exchanging PowerPoint files is free.

I think we’re still a long way from being done with this. We certainly don’t need anyone to run around the world like I did and say “consider PDF.” That’s done.

The next thing is all about automating how we communicate, like what Enfocus is doing. That’s PDF, JDF, HTML, XML, all the things that take information and converts them into what they need to be. There’s still a lot of work that needs to be done. Maybe we need an XML evangelist?

Read the first part of this interview here.