Nice, thanks for sharing. Currently we use Acrobat to OCR scanned documents, it seems to work well but doesn't keep up to our high-speed scanners. Having it automated sounds great. How does the speed/accuracy of WatchOCR compare to commercial products?

Colour accuracy isn't possible we're aware of that. I'm more dealing with subtle changes of layers, transparencies, gradients, that sort of thing. I did re-test some of the viewers and most of the issues seem to have been fixed, but not all. Flattening isn't an option, the resulting files could end up quite huge, even downsampled. Our software vendors do respond to requests quite well, but if we tell them "ABC open source PDF viewer is doing this, but every other viewer is fine" it's not going to go to the top of the support queue. Even if the other viewers were all perfect, it doesn't solve the other reason we need to use Acrobat: most commercial plugins and extensions are written for Acrobat. I think that's a valid answer to the parent "Who needs it?" even if you don't like it.

Many people need it. There are plugins and workflows that use Acrobat in many different businesses, and most small/medium businesses couldn't afford to have alternatives written for them, and have to stick to the commercial offerings. For me specifically, I send clients PDF proofs of printing orders, and any reader other than Acrobat can't be relied upon to be accurate enough for proofing purposes: they usually mess up transparencies, fonts, and other critical information.

My small company (~25 people) went a completely different route: I am the only IT person, so they made me management. I'm one of three people responsible for dicision making, and only have to get the agreement of the other two for major decisions. Everything gets done on time, under budget, and with no meetings.

Shouldn't the church be banned, for not praying hard enough to prevent this?

There's an iPod wrapped up under my Holiday Tree, I just *know* there is!