For Position Only: Back to Business at Seybold SF 2001

Anita Dennis

With the American flag behind him on the stage and only a half-full audience, the words from keynote speaker and Interwoven COO (chief operating officer) John Van Siclen were an eerie understatement: “We’re building content for a much more complex world,” he said at Seybold San Francisco on Monday morning.
I went to Moscone with some trepidation yesterday, not because I was worried about a terrorist attack but because I didn’t know how the tragic attacks on the East Coast would affect the annual Web and print publishing show. Usually I look forward to Seybold San Francisco as a time to see old friends, get caught up with new technology, and fill up with news about trends, changes, and products that will make me think about exciting new ways to work.
But I knew this show would be different following the attack on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center earlier this month. I was glad the Key3Media Events President Gene Gable went on with the show: I think it’s time to get on with business, even if it’s not as usual. But I definitely felt a pall over the opening keynote session, between the flag on stage, so many empty chairs, and Gable’s introductory warning that various sessions had changed at the last minute due to speakers dropping out. Just how is this all going to play out, I wondered?
Cross-Media Publishing
So sitting through the opening keynote, part of a first-ever conference track on cross-media publishing, I felt discouraged rather than inspired. I felt numb listening to Van Siclen talk of how communication channels have evolved from print-centric in 1997 to multidisciplinary in 2001, with print, the Web, handhelds, interactive TV, and voice systems all prevalent and converging, necessitating an integrated brand message and an infrastructure that facilitates collaborative production and intelligent, simplified business management.
Then Stephanie Acker-Moy, general manager of HP.com, echoed Van Siclen’s comments that companies will find going forward that they can’t continue to afford specialists for print and Web design — that “now everybody will is doing everything,” in Van Siclen’s words. I only felt more sad at the thought of the turning economy, of the dozens of people I know and the thousands I don’t who have been laid off in the last year, or wound up unemployed when their dot-com became a dot-bomb.
I perked up a bit when Michael O’Donnell, CEO of Salon.com, was introduced. A last-minute replacement for Kent State’s Roger Fidler, who couldn’t make it to the show because of recent events, O’Donnell showed a flashy, funny, albeit self-aggrandizing video about his site and talked about the fact that Web content costs and that the Web culture must wake up to that fact: the free-information ride is coming to an end. Now there’s a controversial subject, I thought, perking up (and a stance I happen to agree with). Then O’Donnell drove home the point that we all value Web-based content as evidenced by the statistic that news sites have seen a 50-to-400-percent increase in traffic since Tuesday, September 11.
Pop. The bubble burst. My heart deflated once again. And it wasn’t even 10 a.m. on the first day of the show.
Tuning In
So I went for a cup of coffee and then hot-footed it up to the first session of the PDF for Print Publishing Day, where representatives from Adobe and Apple were to talk about Acrobat 5.0 and PDF in Mac OS X. And I was pleasantly surprised to walk into a packed room. There had to be 300 people in that dark, crowded space. I stood against the back wall with a dozen other observers and listened to Macduff Hughes espouse the new features in Acrobat 5.0 and PDF 1.4 while Moscone employees set up another row of seats to accommodate the overflow.
And then a miraculous thing happened: I started listening to the presentations and thinking only about what was being discussed inside those four walls:

• If you open a PDF in Acrobat 5.0 and click on the Thumbnails palette, Acrobat creates them on the fly even if they weren’t distilled with the file (I knew that), but it doesn’t embed them unless you proactively instruct it to (I didn’t realize that).
• The major difference between PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3 files is that the latter require ICC output profiles be embedded with the PDF. (Oh, now I get it.)
• TL Enterprises, a magazine publisher that performs in-house prepress on composite PDF files, doesn’t trap them. (Hmm. That’s VERY interesting. But prepress director Bob Dawson said that after printing several thousand pages they’ve found that going CTP eliminated the subtle shifts that can cause problems when film is imaged to plate, and that as long as the press is in register they don’t need to trap.)

Getting It Done
As members of the audience queued up to ask the speakers questions — Which PDF/X standard is best for wide-format printing? Why do I need to verify that my PDF files meet this new standard when my printer accepts what I provide and they print just fine? — I came back down to the here and now. Despite the terrorist attacks that occurred two short weeks ago and the rhetoric of war that permeates the headlines, there is still work to do. We’re still faced with producing pages, and we still need ways to do it more efficiently — to preflight our PDF files, to make sure they RIP, and to learn from our peers’ experiences. By the end of the day, after bumping into old friends who came from across the Bay and across the ocean, and meeting new business contacts, I was tremendously reassured that life does go on, and that we’re all moving forward together.
I took copious notes throughout the afternoon, but I didn’t encounter any revolutionary new technologies or products. After all, Acrobat 5.0 has been out for six months, and the debate between which is better — TIFF/IT, PDF, or application files — is hardly a new one. But that afforded me a sense of continuity and even peace — that what mattered before the events of September 11 still matters afterward.
I write this column after only one day at the show, and by the time you read this, Seybold SF will have ramped up more fully. The expo will be in full swing, hundreds or thousands more attendees will be milling about Moscone Center, and people will be rushing to meetings and parties. Even if the show is a bit more subdued than usual, I hope that in the long run, other attendees find it as cathartic as I have.