Mountain View, California-based Adobe Systems Inc has used the experience gained from using PostScript in embedded systems for printers to launch an embeddable version of Acrobat. Acrobat Player is designed for microprocessor-based devices such as navigation systems, projectors and set-top boxes. It is a portable and device-independent version of the company’s new flagship product. Adobe has already signed development and marketing deals for the embedded version with In Focus Systems Inc, Proxima Corp and Trimble Navigation Ltd. It will also provide development tools, co-development resources and source code to OEM customers so they can build customised systems supporting a variety of hardware and software systems. Acrobat Player uses the same graphics and font rendering technology as other Acrobat products, to enable documents full of graphics, fonts or photographs, to be transfered between computer systems without the loss of information. Trimble, Sunnyvale, California, will use Acrobat Player to update its global navigation systems, making them more attractive to the consumer market, which the company reckons is about to blossom. For example, in a car’s navigation system, the program would enable the display of high-quality maps linked to a variety of other information, such as hotel and restaurant guides, service station listings and airport directories, with all the data received via satellite. This will be possible through Acrobat Player’s hypertext linking, support for a range of compression algorithms and support for the Adobe’s Portable Document Format, the file format that preserves document fidelity across computer systems. Support for this means devices based on the embeddable system will be able to provide access to a wide range of digital content without it having to be re-au thored in a proprietary format with specialised tools. The other advantage is that Portable Document Formant files are substantially smaller than many other image file formats, an important factor for say, Trimble’s navigation systems because it will enable then to provide greater amounts of information in a single system. In Focus Systems of Wilsonville, Oregon, and Proxima, San Diego, California are both using the product to develop high-end multimedia projection units. In Focus will integrate it with its liquid crystal display multimedia projection products. The first product, expected later this year, will run Portable Document Format presentations from floppy disks. The initial release of Acrobat Player will be available on Motorola Inc’s 68EC040 and 68EC060, and the Intel Corp’s 80960 embedded controllers running a customised version of the JMI C-exec embedded operating system. The next version, scheduled for an end of summer release, will also support digital video and audio formats and embedded version of the PowerPC microprocessor. As for the parent product, version 2.1 or Acrobat has just been released and Adobe will release a new presentation plug-in giving users the ability to drag and drop presentation slides, insert special effects, temporarily cross out slides within a presentation, rotate slides and integrate and edit download files, Adobe asserts.
