An Example of Teamwork
Written by Marketing Staff
For a few months during the 2002-2003 school year, PDF stood for ‘pretty darn frustrating’ for Crystal Kazmierski, Christoph Sisson and 11 other advisers.
Those advisers had used PDF Submission the previous year. Now they were using Adobe InDesign for the first year, and the pages they began to send were not printing correctly. This problem did not exist with Adobe PageMaker and PDF submission.
What evolved from this problem was more than a solution. It was a realization that Walsworth Publishing Company and Adobe Systems Incorporated work together well to solve problems. It was one of several things that led to the alliance between the two companies.
The problem was complicated, but in simple terms, InDesign supports transparencies, but the PDF flattening process the company used did not support them, so the pages would not print properly.
“I was frustrated,” said Kazmierski, adviser at Arrowhead Christian Academy, Redlands, Calif. “I thought PDFs were a safeguard kind of thing. Michelle (Pyle) kept me sane.”
At the time, Pyle was Walsworth’s manager of computer support and the project manager for PDF. She dived into the problem with Mike Richman, applications engineer with Adobe. With Walsworth and Adobe technicians working together, finding solutions for all aspects of the problem took three to four months.
“It was ardous at the time because we were trying to meet deadlines,” said Sisson, adviser at Holland High School, Holland, Mich.
With the InDesign/PDF submission issues resolved, the many customers now using both for this current school year will benefit from the hard work of the technicians and the patience of the ground-breaking advisers of the previous year.
Pyle said with Kazmierski pushing the boundaries of InDesign, Walsworth met the challenge, and customers will benefit.
“It put us way ahead of the competition and enabled us not to set limits on our schools,” Pyle said.
Customers also will benefit from the official alliance Walsworth and Adobe entered into in July 2003. Under the alliance, the two companies will work together to streamline yearbook production. One of the goals of the alliance is to keep advisers and yearbook staffs on the cutting-edge of yearbook design.
Another result of the PDF issue resolution is that the 2003 Arrowhead Christian Academy yearbook now is on display at the New York City offices of Adobe. Adobe asked Kazmierski for a copy of her school’s book and a written description of InDesign techniques used in it, in exchange for some software. The book is in Adobe’s Customer Briefing Center, where Adobe officials hold high-level briefings with key customers about Adobe technology.
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