Now, integration inside Netscape and improvements in handling Web functions such as linking and searching could accelerate their usage in Web-based publishing. The new version of Envoy will support linking to multiple documents as well as to URLs across the Internet. According to the company, Envoy files are smaller than equivalent Acrobat files. Acrobat's new version, code-named Amber, is optimized for use on the Internet. It also supports progressive downloading so that users will be able to view PDF pages singly without having to wait for the entire file.
Text is rendered first, while images and other large objects are downloaded in the background.
A third-party tool will be available to support indexing and searching of PDF documents on the Web. A prerelease version of Amber for Navigator 2.0 for Windows will be available in late October, the company said, and the full release will ship in the first half of 1996. Though the Internet is global, languages are local. Since Esperanto doesn't seem to be catching on, a chasm is growing between the ability of people to access documents and their ability to understand them. Now a Netscape plug-in from Globalink will close the gap by providing rapid translation of documents to and from English and French, German, Spanish, and Italian.