Macromedia is making babysteps toward a collision course with Adobe.  Upcoming Macromedia Contribute 2 has a feature called FlashPaper which captures any printable documents into a Flash animation.  Sounds familiar?  Yup, it works just like Acrobat does, through a printer driver.

There are some third party tools that convert PDF (Acrobat file format) into SWF (Flash file format), but FlashPaper is a whole new ball game straight up Adobe's alley.  Flash is faster at rendering these pages and each FlashPaper comes with the viewer inside it so you can view FlashPaper on most computers.

It does have some seemingly needless limitations:

• FlashPaper documents can only be viewed in a web page, so you can’t email FlashPaper documents directly to others.
• The text in FlashPaper documents cannot be searched or selected by website visitors.
• FlashPaper does not support digital signatures, annotations and a host of other features of enterprise document sharing technologies like PDF.
• FlashPaper is only available on Windows 2000 and XP, although Macromedia does have plans to support Mac OS X in the next release of Contribute.

Don't you think the list of limitations point straight at Acrobat?  While they might deny it, I think this is the first shot of a long war.  With Microsoft's ongoing efforts in this area, I think we got some excitement coming our way.

[I erased my little pseudo-rap.  It sucked.]