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July 25, 1993

FARALLON HOPES TO TURN ADOBE’s ACROBAT ON ITS HEAD WITH REPLICA PORTABLE DOCUMENT SOFTWARE

By CBR Staff Writer

Farallon Computing Inc announced a direct competitor to Adobe Acrobat last week in the form of Replica, portable document software for networked Windows and Macintosh computers. Acrobat is Adobe Systems Inc’s new pitch for immortality: its aim is to enable documents to be passed around between Mac, Windows and (later) MS-DOS and Unix boxes, without the machines needing to share fonts or graphics packages. Emeryville, California-based Farallon’s approach is focussed solely on Windows and Macintosh – where the company’s expertise lies. The two technologies are based on very different bases – Adobe has extended PostScript, whereas Farallon’s new effort uses TrueType as its foundation. In one important marketing respect, however Farallon has stolen a march on Adobe – it has decided to allow users to replicate and distribute its viewer software for free, whereas Acrobat viewer costs money. Farallon says that recipients can copy this information… and paste it into another document. Any pasted text becomes part of the document to which it has been added and can be changed or edited in any way. Whereas Acrobat stores font metrics within the document so that a close approximation can be re-built at the other end should the original font be missing, Replica actually embeds some characters from the appropriate TrueType font, which raises questions about the volume of data that has to be transmitted. The recommended configuration for Replica is only a 4Mb 80386 machine where Acrobat wants an 8Mb 80486, but on smaller documents, the size overhead when using Replica is painfully noticeable. Farallon’s UK product marketing manager Bill Friedman says that a 16Kb word file with embedded graphics balloons to 38Kb when converted to Replica’s file format using optimal fonts. When using all fonts, the size is more like 50Kb. Meanwhile, Adobe manages to reduce the document to a more comfortable 15Kb. As with Acrobat, Replica documents are constructed simply by printing from any application, with the output being captured by Replica Creator. Creator has direct hooks to popular electronic mail packages the creator knows about VIM and MAPI – enabling the document to be mailed directly. Creator also has compression facilities and the ability to bundle the viewer in with the document as it is transmitted – recipients are asked whether they want to install it on their machines free of charge. Where Acrobat scores is in its ability to retain structured information within large documents and carry out complex searches on the text. Replica only supports simple text searches. It appears that Replica sees documents simply as letters and graphics.

Windows only

The big disadvantage for Replica right now is the limited systems supported. It is presently available for Windows only, with the Macintosh version available next quarter. This means that currently, users can only pass documents from Windows machine to Windows machine. This could mean that Farallon was panicked into rushing out the product following Adobe’s shipment of Acrobat. Farllon is not planning an MS-DOS or Unix version of Replica, whereas Adobe has these bases covered. With Farallon aggressively targetting the business world and placing particular emphasis on the market for internal corporate communications, lack of support for these two environments could be crippling. Replica packages for both Windows and the Macintosh will sell for UKP75 per user, or UKP564 for a 10-pack in the UK.

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