Acrobat files?

[Brian Yennie]

> In other words - there is no good way to use PDF files right now.  ;-)

Yep.

> I agree. For the Director xtra, they used low-level Acrobat libraries, 
> licensed from Adobe, I believe. The end result is extremely powerful. 
> You can make your own version of Acrobat reader within Director, with 
> search, fillable forms, printing, cross-document linking and PDF 
> security functions all available. This is the sort of capability which 
> would be truly awesome in Rev, which is arguably better suited to 
> "document style" applications, as well as business apps.
>
> In one of my current projects, I dynamically index several hundred 
> complex PDF files into a high speed embedded database, and do 
> full-context search among all of them, display, print, etc. Not to 
> mention that I build an animated hierarchal menu for them on-the-fly, 
> and have sliding panels which reveal keyword, author, etc.

Huh. Perhaps the company that wrote the Director xtra would consider 
farming out a copy to a Rev developer if they felt they could sell a 
few copies over on this side. Sounds about right though- Adobe in my 
experience is about as anti-standard, anti-open as Macromedia and their 
Flash format =). Both publish "open standards" but make it all but 
impossible to do anything with them if you don't license exorbitantly 
expensive libraries.

- Brian