Update June 2024

 After a long gap this seems a good place to put this.

I think the newspapers in UK may be coming to an end or significant change. Evening Standard is stopping as a nightly print event, now a website and weekly magazine.

Simon Jenkins in Guardian wrote about the small online blogs and websites but claimed the recent local election in London showed there was "no substitte for stable institutional critique of local democracy" . I am not sure the Standard was doing this. Couple of tiimes I visited London I read a few paged of positive stuff about the conservative candidate. Not sure it was accurate or appealing to most readers.

I may be off topic for a blog about print but it is a bit relevant. A lot of Fleet Street has always supported the Conservative Party. Is this selling any extra copies at this time? Possibly more newspapers will fllow the Standard.

Guardian editorial claimed it should be possible to reimagine the Standard for a digital age. It may be too late. Long ago there was Guardian Unlimited Talk. A bulletin board for readers. Cancelled one Friday lunchtime without notice.  

I may come back to this blog and make some links

note

Jan 23 2024 Guardian report on Reach and local press. I think the Express and Echo may not last either. Now quite expensive.

JDF is normalised, conclusion for drupa 2012

This turns up on YouTube seems reasonable as a summary. JDF no longer a buzz word but automation is assumed. I still think Adobe should have done more to explain JDF to the people who bought Acrobat. Even if they are engineers or lawyers they might buy print sometimes and the fact they can specify JDF is worth a mention. Still, Web 2 Print has taken over, the JDF is in there somewhere but who needs to know?

More on Wild Show, explanation for Kodak re drupa etc. #drupa @kodakCB

A bit more explanation about the Wild Show and why phoning in could be a problem. I started on the Wild Show as a guest on the previous show in this time slot. So I am only learning gradually. Both Chris and JD are away this week so I can choose all the music and also talk about drupa more than usual. We have played the song a couple of times. Three questions for you. If Kodak is concentrating on print and the patents on cameras are for transfer to phone companies, is there any guidance on which ones? I often use a Kodak Zi8 given to me at IPEX where my blog got me press credentials. But where to go next? Wifi would be good. Maybe you can't comment on this but any clues welcome. Second, what do you think is happening at drupa with video and social media. The news seems to be Benny Landa and as far as I can tell his social media policy is not very advanced. Search on YouTube / Twitter finds a guitar player in New York. But it seems that for impact a trade show with a suitable demo is still working ok. Do you think there will soon be a massive inkjet machine anywhere near Exeter UK. Our regional press is not that secure at the moment. If there was one in Bristol there could be regional variations on national publications. Examples from other locations would also be interesting. @kodakCB Just seen your tweet while writing this. Yes, YouTube would be excellent. There could be a link on our Facebook page and I will play the sound tomorrow. (copied from Posterous blog - will789gb - as seems to be a bit slow

Translate Beyond Print to find more on Clickable Paper

http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.beyond-print.de/2012/05/05/clickable-paper-als-alternative-zu-qr-code/&ei=idaoT7y-CPCL4gS3kOCtCQ&sa=X&oi=translate&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CEUQ7gEwAg&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dricoh%2Bqr%2Bcode%2Bdrupa%26hl%3Den%26biw%3D1024%26bih%3D667%26gbv%3D2%26tbm%3Dblg Not sure that will work as a link. If not search on Ricoh and clickable paper. I do realise that drupa is in Germany. But I also think that beyond.print could get a substantial English audience if more was available. Google translationis good but I'm not quite sure about all of it. So far also found this video by the way, the soundtrack is interesting, there is more variation than you might expect.

Harlequin RIP fast enough for variable data

As reported by Digital Press, Harlequin has a RIP that can cope with the speed of digital printing. http://www.paperandprint.com/cgi-bin/whitmar/news_all.pl?itemstyle=template;mag=dp;show=current;type=articles;item=6433 Probably Adobe are interested in this area as well but not much is coming over other than that Adobe seems not to be there. (Good reviews for the Creative Cloud however even though there is not much yet on Acrobat)

Probably this is the nanotechnology drupa #VIDEOdrupa

All the reports confirm that Landa and nanotechnology have made an impression on drupa 2012. There are even renewed claims for print in comparison with claims for digital technology- ( the last part of this clip is about another aspect of cross media) Landa seems to be aimed at run lengths definitely into litho territory. Komori, Heidelberg and Manroland are supporting with kit using the technology. So it is probably further ahead than the early models from Indigo. Nothing to be delivered for a couple of years but this looks like significant technology based on hard copy. Significant shifts to digital away from paper may take several decades but I think we should discuss when this process first started. The video IPEX in 2010 was perhaps the time that video was noticed. Compared to nanotechnology it may just seem normal at drupa going forward.

#VIDEOdrupa Andy Tribute starts the cloud discussion

drupa 2012 is next week but has already started. Andy Tribute considers this the "cloud drupa" and has support for this on the WhatTheyThink YouTube channel. I still think this will turn out to be the video drupa. Watch what they do as much as what they say. But what is the nature of video in the cloud? Will it rely on production values, big budgets? or is it more about conversation, lots of small bits of text some of which are read out to camera? As far as I know WhatTheyThink is only online. How much hard copy they use is unclear to me. Quite right about the dip - the innovation parc. I hope there will be lots of video from close up.

Haymarket morphs Printweek online

My copy of Printweek has arrived as hard copy. Thicker paper and a lot of adverts this week, but there are fewer features and the news items are short, linking to detail on the website. Jo's Helpline shows the problem in full, but you have to go to the website for the answer. So the trend seems to be to use the hard copy as promotion for the website. this is the only weekly news publication for the UK print industry so the endorsement for online is significant.

An editorial promises more analysis and longer articles on technology but these could be in a monthly publication. The longterm future of a weekly cycle for news that mostly just links to online detail is uncertain.

The website has also been redesigned with a clearer feed from Twitter. The blogs are not easier to find though, which is a pity. Jo Francis suggests the advert strength in this issue is similar to the time around IPEX 1998 or drupa 2000. It will be interesting to see how this continues, but the time perspective is interesting. I won't update the blog title or the one for IPEX. Probably more posts for drupa now as 2012 is not far off.

There is no mention of video in the print version but there is a section on the website. At IPEX it was clear that some stands had their own direct channel. As Haymarket moves online this is another area to watch.

The website is global in scope with sections linked to other print publications in Australia and Germany. This reflects the reality of web publishing, the audience is global. Printweek is ahead of UK newspapers here. Peter Preston is always complaining about the difficulty of positioning advertising for the audience outside the UK. The Guardian continues to be muddled about an attitude to the web and social media. But Haymarket has a clear direction.

Acrobat X shows Adobe has stopped development for PDF

As far as I can tell so far there is nothing new with Acrobat X about PDF as such. It is all about Flash, the portfolio intro that can contain PDF as we have known it.

I did look at this when Acrobat 9 came out but it requires that the people you send files to upgrade and i found this was not always the case. I have not come across any examples of portfolios other than Adobe samples.

Maybe my experience on the general web is misleading. There may be organisations with standards on the latest Adobe software where portfolios work well. But I don't see this Flash aspect as moving Acrobat on around the issues of text documents.

There was a project to rewrite PDF as "XML friendly" . MARS was renamed as PDFXML but recently nothing has happened. The Mars blog was last updated in September 2008. Possibly there will be more information when Acrobat.com is fully updated. Buzzword can export as PDF or ePUB, the format for ebooks that reflows on smaller screens. Maybe there is a view about workflows that cover various ways of publishing text and flat graphics. But there is no evidence that PDF has any further to go that would relate to this.

What Developers Should Know About Acrobat X , according to Joel Gerachi, includes a new Portfolio SDK so that Flash Professional Designers can use their existing skills to create “Visual Themes”. This presumably assumes you have a copy of Flash.

Meanwhile the Adobe classic themes around Postscript and PDF are now based on ISO standards. Maybe it is reasonable that Adobe no longer relates to this much in promotion. But there is still activity around hard copy and flat documents. As this is no longer worth promoting or developing from an Adobe perspective, it is worth exploring alternative software either at other price levels or from niche suppliers where there is still an interest.