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Why Fight? Print, Web Publishing Merges

Macromedia, Adobe, and Quark stride toward cross-media publishing.

By Cameron Crouch, PCWorld   

Traditionally focused on Web-savvy publishers and designers, Macromedia wants to tantalize print jockeys with tools to ease print production into multimedia broadcasting. At the Seybold Seminars here on Monday, Macromedia announced the Flash Writer extension for Adobe Illustrator. Scheduled to be available at the end of September as a free download, Flash Writer lets you export Illustrator files into the Flash file format (.swf), which is much smaller and more versatile on the Web.

With Flash Writer, Macromedia hopes to attract "graphic designers looking for guidance to the Web," says Eric Wittman, product manager for Flash and Generator. Still, Flash Writer may be more convenience than innovation, as designers can already save Illustrator files in Encapsulated Postscript (.eps) format to use in Flash.

Macromedia also announced Generator 2, server software that creates templates to pull data and multimedia objects into a Flash Web site. Available in September for $2999 (for Windows NT), Generator uses the Flash front end to create Web sites with database-driven automation, updates, and personalization.

"It works like mail merge, but is multimedia merge," says Norman Meyrowitz, president of Macromedia's products division. Though the server is pricey, you can download Generator template tools free at the Flash site.

Adobe Partners to Push PDF

Adobe, with its graphics edge in print-publishing tools, is "focus[ing] on technology and specific products and work[ing] with a whole ecosystem of third parties," says Chuck Geschke, cochair and president of Adobe Systems. The company aims to service print and Web publishers who have a print workflow as well as pure Web publishers that have an ad hoc workflow, he adds.

Besides announcing the Internet commerce tools PDF Merchant and Acrobat Reader with Web Flow, Adobe is taking its mainstay, Photoshop, to the Web. Adobe GoLive 4.0, a Web publishing application, integrates with Photoshop 5.5 using Image Ready 2.0 (which ships with Photoshop 5.5).

"Image Ready 2.0 extends that power of Photoshop for the Web," says John Kranz, an Adobe senior evangelist. Pushing cross-media development to its partners, Adobe says Cascade's Merchant Publishing Solution provides cross-media publishing with templates for Adobe InDesign and GoLive.

Print-layout savant Quark also shows signs of Internet interest, if not fever.

"The Web is the most important thing that's happened to the written word since the printing press," says Tim Gill, Quark's chair and chief technology officer. "It's 'Print TV,' with the properties of print and nearly the speed of TV."

Moving Easily Among Media

While Macromedia, Adobe, and Quark target different customers, the three share an interest in developing standards for cross-media publishing. Macromedia is pushing Flash as the Web format, while Quark and Adobe look to XML and its companion standards.

Announced this week, Avenue.quark is a way to take Quark XPress content and move it to the Web and other media using XML tags. True to Quark's customer base of print publications, company representatives demonstrated the tool by dragging content from a Quark XPress layout for the London Guardian newspaper into an XML workspace. XPress automatically extracts formatting such as headlines, subheads, and bylines. You can then post the content on a Vignette Story Server. Due to ship in late September, Quark XPress 4.1 promises better support for PDF and Web tools for developers.