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Subject:Issues with Adobe Acrobat and PDFs? From:"Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 30 Aug 2001 12:06:17 -0400
Rowena Hart is <<... starting to prepare a course called "Adobe Acrobat for
Technical Writers" that I'll be teaching in Vancouver, BC in 2002. It would
really help me if people who have used the Adobe Acrobat suite to create
PDFs would share their experiences or issues.>>
My biggest issue is not a technical one, but rather a matter of audience and
context: The overwhelming use of PDF is to dump printed documents online and
thus shift printing costs from the information producer to the information
consumer. I have strong objections to this as a user of this information:
I'd rather pay you $5 for a good printed manual than have to print your
manual myself, at considerably greater cost and considerably lower
usability. The corollary to this issue is that if you're going to make PDFs
available for online use, you have to _design_ them for online use: that
means the page size must be adjusted to fit on the screen, with the text
still legible and without (if possible) obscuring any software that the PDF
is intended to describe. Obviously, something designed for onscreen use
won't print as well as something designed to be printed, and students must
be aware of the conflict between onscreen and on-paper use.
I do have one technical issue to raise: In earlier versions of Acrobat,
TrueType fonts were not properly supported, and this meant that occasional
letters would disappear from the entire PDF file; I believe the problem had
something to do with subsetting fonts rather than embedding the entire font,
and that decision's something worth raising in your class. Ironically
enough, I first encountered this with Adobe's PDF reference library for
PageMaker, in which all the W's had disappeared. <g> I don't know whether
this problem has been resolved with current versions of the software, but
it's worth asking techwr-l for the collective experience with this problem.
--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
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