Global Graphics' Martin Bailey discusses his role in bringing PDF to the prepress world and where Global Graphics views itself in the marketplace.
Celebrating a
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 Champions of PDF features Martin Bailey, Global Graphics’ senior technical
consultant, who was instrumental in developing the Harlequin RIP before PDF was
born. Later, seeing the value of PDF in the prepress workflow, he championed the
integration of PDF capabilities into Harlequin, one of the earliest RIPs to have
them. After Harlequin was acquired by Global Graphics in 1999, Bailey stayed
with the new entity, where he remains the house prepress expert and helps sculpt
the Jaws product line.
PDFzone:
What got you started working with PDF?
Martin Bailey: I started off in PostScript back in
the late 1980s, first as a service bureau manager and then doing a bit of
programming. From that position, I moved on to Harlequin--now Global Graphics.
Obviously, we had a PostScript RIP, we were watching what was going on around us
and we knew we had to do PDF at some point.
Around 1996, we
finally decided we ought to do something about PDF. I wrote the first prototype
of PDF interpretation in the Harlequin RIP. We took it to a trade show; I think
it was Seybold in New York. We put it in front of the OEMs, and they said,
"Well, yes, this PDF might amount to something, sometime," but they weren’t
bothered at that point. So like all good prototypes, that one was thrown away
and we built something properly from scratch and it grew from
there.
PDFzone: What is your role in shaping the Global
product line?
Bailey:
My title is senior
technical consultant, and I’m often asked what that really means. The closest
I’ve been able to get to it is that I do everything that doesn’t fit into
everyone else’s job description. I still do some development, requirements
analysis, I sit on a number of standards committees, some technical
marketing--speaking at conferences.
I know I never get
bored.
PDFzone: How would
you express how Global is positioned in the market? The company has its hands in
the desktop office market, prepress and it even appeals to
developers.
Bailey:
Our primary focus is obviously
to sell products; that tends to build down to providing what people need. Your
unspoken question was how we position ourselves vis-a-vis Adobe. There’s no
point in going head-to-head with them, no point in releasing another Acrobat. So
what we’ve done is look at what people need that Acrobat doesn’t address, and in
places where Adobe is unlikely to move.
One of our
OEMs--activePDF--talks about being "little A" to Adobe’s "big A"; they’re proud
of being an ankle biter to the 800-pound gorilla. You can stretch that analogy a
little further and point out that an 800-pound gorilla is very good at going
very fast in the direction he wants to go, whereas the ankle-biting terrier is
far more flexible. He can dart around and go down the rabbit holes where people
actually need stuff that doesn’t match Adobe’s vision about where their products
are going. So we’ve taken our basic technology and re-use the engine we have in
as many different ways as possible.
So if you look at
our PostScript-to-PDF conversion tools, it’s in Jaws PDF Creator, Server,
Courier. It’s also in a whole bunch of other products that people might not have
heard of, because we make those libraries available.
PDFzone: Are you a
graphic arts company first, a developer company second and a desktop end-user
software company third--is that the right order of your priorities?
Bailey:
I wouldn’t put them in that
sequence. I would take the last two correctly--as a development technology
first. But even if you develop the best product in the world, unless you wrap it
in a way people can actually use it, it’s not going to sell. One of the ways we
can wrap it is an end-user product, and that’s great.
Our primary focus
in terms of the market sector is prepress, although we’re continually finding
that once you’ve got a good solution in prepress, the same solution addresses
many of the different needs in the corporate, financial and government sectors
as well.
PDFzone: That’s interesting--we’re heard that
suggested before, how prepress users are the early adopters, the beta testers of
PDF technologies that eventually end up widely used in the much larger corporate
market. They’re on the cutting edge, and they help work out the kinks for the
rest of us.
Bailey:
There are certainly some
features that are introduced first for the corporate market, but I think the
irony is that, really, PDF wasn’t designed for graphic arts if you look at the
history. It appears to have been designed for the corporate market. But because
it came out of the same stable as PostScript, everyone in prepress assumed they
could use it for prepress.
For a couple of
years it was a bit like trying to force a square peg into a round hole, but
we’re now at a stage where it really does well for prepress.
Next Week : Will
Jaws PDF Editor and Creator be folded into a single application? What can Adobe
add to the PDF spec that would make the file format a better widget for all
users? Is the paperless office, in Bailey’s opinion, ever going to be possible?
Bailey addresses all this and more.
