PDFzone: In your opinion, why is PDF as a file format so useful to so many different people in the prepress and office realms and elsewhere, too?

Martin Bailey: Fundamentally, because it originally was conceived as simply a way of recording what a printed piece would look like. Even though it wasn’t conceived for the printing market, the framework design for it is really very good.

PDFzone: In the office world, Acrobat’s too expensive for some budgets and Global Graphics offers a less-expensive alternative. And there are many others out there for PDF-creation software. Where is the desktop market for PDF going?

Bailey: At the risk of sounding facetious, we’re headed in the direction of total chaos. The corporate market is going to find out within the next few years the lessons the prepress market discovered some years ago: I well remember when PDF first came along, some of the pundits said it was so wonderful you wouldn’t have to preflight it. We all know now that was false, and many of us knew then it was false.

One of the downsides of PDF is also one of its strengths: It’s so flexible. You have to preflight a PDF because you can stick images in it at 36 dpi, and you can put RGB images when your print service provider won’t accept them.

I think we’re going to see the same thing in the corporate market. We’re going to start finding situations where people haven’t embedded fonts and they needed to, and people are going to receive PDF files that they aren’t going to be able to do anything with--even though they are perfectly valid PDFs.

That’s the reason behind the PDF/a standard: Because PDF is so flexible, we have to have specific subsets of requirements. The issue is getting the configuration right. With Jaws PDF Creator and Editor, it’s relatively easy to get things right--if you know what you’re doing.

PDFzone: Global has had a lot of major announcements over the last year, from product upgrades to new software introductions to partnering with companies like Quark to KonicaMinolta--which one is, in your mind, the most significant?

Bailey: Most significant is taking them all together. The first part of the Quark announcement is that the PDF creation technology in QuarkXPress is based on the same technology for PDF creation that is in Jaws PDF Creator.

The other half of the Quark announcement is actually that the Jaws RIP--which handles the importing of PDF files--is in there. That’s the same RIP in the KonicaMinolta announcement.

The whole thing is showing that we have a good, strong, underlying collection of technologies and we’re now exploring all the market sectors that those can be sold into.

PDFzone: When the Quark deal came through, what was the mood at Global? Did you pop champagne at the office, do an end-zone dance, or was it basically business as usual?

Bailey: Metaphorically, we had a party. I can’t remember what we did then, but we do occasionally get pizza lunches to mark specific milestones.

PDFzone: What’s your next PDF project at Global?

Bailey: The big emphasis this year is looking at JDF-enabling a whole bunch of our technologies. We’ll be showing the JDF-enabled Harlequin RIP at Drupa.

PDFzone: How did Adobe’s breaking up of Acrobat into three pieces last year affect the path Global was on?

Bailey: There are some who have said that the idea of breaking it into three--and Acrobat Elements--was a direct response to Jaws PDF Creator. I don’t think it’s really affected our business strategy at all because our main approach is to take our strong, solid, well-proven core technologies and make those available to people in whatever way that works most appropriately for them.

So while off-the-shelf, boxed, end-user applications are important to us, they aren’t the only reason for having all that underlying core technology.

PDFzone: Will Jaws PDF Creator and Editor ever be stitched together into one application, do you think?

Bailey: I don’t believe there’s actually much value in having them as one application because they are doing such different things. If you want to draw the parallel, why would Adobe make Distiller and Acrobat into a single product? They bundle it together in the same box, but they’re used at different points in the workflow, so I don’t think it makes sense to join the two together.

PDFzone: What could Adobe add to PDF to make it a better widget?

Bailey: My answer is "no more." You have people who have RIPs that can’t even make PDF 1.4; others are making PDF 1.5 files and trying to send them. It would be kind of nice to the prepress industry--I think we have everything in current versions of PDF that we want--to have things settle down for a few years and get up to speed with what these wonderful toys we have at the moment can do.

A nice slowdown would be good.

PDFzone: Paperless office: Future reality or present mirage?

Bailey: I seem to remember talking about the paperless office in the ‘70s, and office use of paper is massively larger now than it was then. The use of paper is constrained by social and cultural issues than it is by technological ones--I believe it’s driven by screen technology and not file format technology.

Until we have the screen technology on which people are willing to read a 70-page tome, people will still print it out. We still haven’t gotten it down yet.

PDFzone: If you had unlimited resources and time to publish your definitive e-book what would it be and why?

Bailey: People have been nagging me since the mid-‘80s to write a book on, well, originally what was then called desktop publishing. We tend to use slightly more grown-up words for it now, but it’s basically the same thing. Maybe it would be nice to get that out of my system so people would stop nagging me about it.