Finally, portable document technology takes off.

In the past two months, portable document software has begun to look like one of the year's hottest technologies. New versions of the three leading document creation programs--Adobe Acrobat, Novell's Envoy, and No Hands Software's Common Ground--have solved most of the technical and pricing gotchas that stalled the market a year ago. America on-Line, CompuServe, GEnie, SpaceWorks, Mosaic, ziff-Davis Interactive, Apple Computer, and other partners will soon start to pump millions of free document viewers into the marketplace. Adobe chairman John Warnock predicts that the electronic document market is about to grow at "a blinding rate," and a lot of people are beginning to believe he's right.

In fact, a solution to the problem of document portability has been long overdue. The embarrassing truth is that paper still remains the only trustworthy medium for distributing formatted documents. Unless two users share precisely the same fonts, the same application versions, the same operating system, and (often) the same printer drivers, they're likely to end up with typographic mush whenever they try to move an electronic document from one PC to another.

So far, the only workable solution to the portability problem has been to strip virtually all formatting from documents distributed over networks or on CD-ROMs. But that's an approach that clearly runs counter to the whole thrust of the desktop publishing revolution, which has made "published" appearance a near-necessity for important documents. Once it becomes easy to distribute formatted documents electronically, we expect commercial publishers and corporations will begin converting literally truckloads of magazines, newsletters, books, documentation, marketing materials, presentations, and reports into paperless versions.

Before that utopian vision comes to pass, however, the marketplace may have to sort out yet another problem of rival file format standards. Unlike paper documents, an electronic document can only be read with the help of a proprietary "viewer" or "reader" module. Adobe, by virtue of its PostScript installed base and its OEM relations with hardware vendors, probably has the best shot at getting the most viewers into circulation. But Adobe could face tough competition if Novell decides to bundle Envoy viewers with every NetWare client. Lotus Notes is another wild card: Any viewer integrated with Notes instantly becomes an important standard. And if Microsoft enters the race by adding viewer technology of its own to Windows, all bets are clearly off. Alliances and endorsements are bound to play an important role in deciding who gets to be the de facto standard (and who gets shuffled off to unimportant niche markets). But there are also some key question marks about portable document technology; the right kind of answers could make a big difference in determining ultimate market leadership.

* What's the right pricing model? Adobe badly miscalculated when it introduced Acrobat 1.0 last year. In addition to charging for the document creation module, Adobe put a $50 price tag on every viewer module. Result: Large users wouldn't touch the product. Adobe has now decided to distribute free viewers (Envoy and Common Ground viewers are also free), but pricing on the document creation side remains a tricky issue for everyone in the category. At the prices that now prevail--and with widespread bundling deals that reduce average prices even further--it's hard to see how any of the developers in this market will be able to afford adequate product development or marketing budgets.

* How important is font fidelity? Acrobat and Envoy documents don't always look as good as the originals, because the viewer sometimes has to substitute near-equivalents for fonts that aren't available on a user's system. To deal with this problem, Bitstream has come up with an OEM product called TrueDoc. TrueDoc accurately encapsulates font outlines (including Asian character sets) and thus produces significantly better-looking electronic documents. TrueDoc is a nifty product, but the one question Bitstream can't answer is whether users actually care about font fidelity. Our guess is that TrueDoc will turn out to be a major checklist item for large commercial publishers of electronic documents (just as hardcore graphic artists have come to demand precise typographic control in high-end desktop publishing packages). If so, No Hands Software--which has licensed TrueDoc technology for Common Ground--could have an unexpected edge in an influential segment of the electronic publishing market.

* Who will solve the page-to-screen problem? Ken Skier, an independent developer of portable document tools, points out that printed pages are usually hard to read if they're transferred unmodified to a lower-resolution computer screen. That's potentially a significant issue for would-be publishers of large manuals and reference works, where thousands of printed pages may have to be tweaked by hand to be readable in electronic form. Again, page-to-screen conversion may not matter to smaller users, but we suspect that whoever provides good automation tools will gain an important advantage among highvolume users.

* Who will provide the server software? Electronic documents tend to be bulky (especially if they include a viewer and embedded fonts). It's likely that big libraries of documents will end up on servers and centralized e-mail systems rather than on individual PCs. And it's also likely that some fairly sophisticated document management software will be required to keep track of document updates and to retrieve information for individual users. In the end, the payoff in the portable document market may not come from document creation software--it may come from a new generation of server database tools for managing those documents.

Adobe Systems, 1585 Charleston Rd., Mountain View, Calif. 94039; 415/961-4400. Bitstream, 215 First St., Cambridge, Mass. 02142; 617/497-6222. No Hands Software, 1301 Shoreway Rd., Belmont, Calif. 94002; 415/802-5800. Novell (WordPerfect), 1555 N. Technology Way, Orem, Utah 84057; 801/225-5000. SkiSoft, 28 Fairlawn Lane, Lexington,. Mass. 02173; 617/861-1190.