From the people that brought you the V12 Database Engine and PDF Xtra comes Impressario: an Xtra for the manipulation of PDF documents. OK, so it's true that PDF Xtra already provides navigation and zooming features to Director, but Impressario is PDF Xtra Pro. It enables you to use PDF documents in ways that, quite frankly, are really impressive.

For the purposes of this review I downloaded the trial version that requires you to have a serial number e-mailed to you. It comes as an installer that, puzzled me at first, as I know where my Xtras folder lives. But I soon discovered that the installer also adds a library of button assets and another of behaviors to assist your journey and, having had a quick peek at the code in the behaviors, I'm very glad they did.

The behaviors aren't the easiest for those unfamiliar with PDFs, but they don't need to be. Not only do you have most of the essential behaviors in a library anyway, there are also a few examples on the site to help you get your head around it. Impressario Xtra is rich in accessibility features aimed at creating projects for the motor and visually impaired. It has the ability to extract text from a PDF document and throw it at the Speech to Text Xtra, as well as the kind of functionality you would expect, such as zoom and page navigation. It offers a lot of other helpful features too, including support for PDF forms, embedded hyperlinks (but not many other embedded actions), the ability to open password-protected documents, and, at the drag and drop of a behavior, the ability to provide word search on a document without leaving the Director MX environment.

As Director MX refuses to even look at a PDF document unaided, Integration's Impressario from Integration New Media (INM) adds a menu item to the "Insert" menu that allows you to link to a PDF as you would an MPEG video with the mpegadvance Xtra. Simply browse for the file, add a password if necessary, and voila. Once in the cast, you can add multiple PDFs to the stage and target them independently. It is entirely self-contained and doesn't even need Acrobat installed to work.

In a shrewd marketing move, INM has provided a selection of "open source" tools and files for download, including a complete, Acrobat-style MIAW PDF reader for the unashamedly lazy. If you can't find what you need in the libraries that come with the Xtra, chances are that it will be in one of the online examples. A small selection of generic toolbars and buttons is also available that appears to have been carefully crafted to be totally inoffensive. I hated them the moment I set eyes on them. The free buttons are more insipid than ugly, but I can't deny that they do speed the process from concept to delivery and, when combined with the pre-rolled behaviors, you can be throwing your PDFs about in no time.

If, for example, you want to personalize PDF documents for individuals, you can use Impressario's PDF forms support and its "save" feature to write a PDF document to a local drive with the completed form data in place - instant personalization. This could be useful for creating contracts, personalized sales tools for companies, and a host of other applications.

There is a dark side to all this, though. Unless you are willing to pay a surcharge, the licensing agreement states that you must make a small sacrifice to the sacred Lord Logo and wear his symbol at all times. But as Director and Quicktime have this caveat too, there's no great loss in waving the "Enhanced By INM's Impressario" flag on your project.

Company:
Integration New Media, Inc.
1425 West René-Levesque Blvd., Suite 906 Montreal, Quebec H3G 1T7 Canada
1(800) 400-1772
http://www.IntegrationNewMedia.com/

Test Environment:
Software: Director MX 9.0
Processor: G5 1.8Ghz,
Memory: 1.5 Gig Ram,
OS: Mac OSX 10.2.8

Price:
$439 U.S.

Summary
I played with Impressario for a little while and liked it. I zoomed, scrolled, printed, and searched a few PDF documents and found it fast, solid, and simple to use. It is available for both Mac and PC, which particularly endears it to me, as I tend to spend a lot of time on Macs too. But, and it's a big but, it's a very specialized Xtra and that is reflected in the cost. I would have to think long and hard about whether the job really required these features or if there were a more economical solution (a mixture of Flash and XML would provide many of the accessibility features) before I bit the $439 U.S. bullet for a one-time license that allows me to use the product on as many projects as I want. An educational license is available for $299 U.S. Integration New Media does offer a discount to MMUG members (contact your preferred one for details), but even so it's quite a price to add to your already-stretched budget, unless, of course, it adds an essential value to your project.