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Subject:Re: Issues with Adobe Acrobat and PDFs From:Peter Kleczka <pkleczka -at- yahoo -dot- com> To:"TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com> Date:Thu, 30 Aug 2001 20:31:50 -0700 (PDT)
Rowena
Here's one...large PDF's are really
pretty inaccesible over the web if
your audience has slow web connections.
The company I work for has about
1500 offices in North America and
most of them are on 56k or slower
modems. Unfortunatly, some of our
manuals make for quite large files
even if delivered as separate chapters.
I looked into Adobe's byteserving feature,
which is supposed to allow users to
browse a PDF in "page-size" chunks instead
of attempting to download the whole PDF
at one time.
<RANT>
Adobe's byteserving
feature is only supported by a few
servers. If your server doesn't support
byteserving, Adobe provides an *unsupported*
Perl script that can byteserve for you;
assuming that your server supports Perl
*and* your server administrator is willing
to support the Perl script.
</RANT>
<PDF_DELIVERY TYPE="ALTERNATIVE">
Our server admin offered resistance so
we investigated elsewhere...leading us
to BCL's Magellan product which converts
large PDFs into single page html files
while maintaining the look and feel of
PDF. You can even print with near the
same quality as PDF, although browser
security prevents more than page-at-a-time
printing.
Magellan doesn't provide a perfect converstion
though. Graphics tend to suffer somewhat
since they are reproduced only in .jpg format.
WingDing fonts get changed into strange symbols
that aren't even close to what was in the
original PDF. And finally, the browser's
scroll-bar doesn't work like PDF -- that is,
PDF users can navigate to the next page by
clicking the scroll bar, but of course web
browser's lack this functionality. This lead
to one user (a web-savvy user I might add)
to complain that our documentation was
incomplete. In fact, they failed to notice
the navigation buttons at the top of the page.
The buttons look and function just like
Acrobat's navigation buttons, so you'd think
someone experienced with PDF might have no
problem with a Magellan converted document.
</PDF_DELIVERY>
HTH,
Pete (pkleczka -at- yahoo -dot- com)
--- "Hart, Rowena" <Hart -at- SelkirkFinancial -dot- com> wrote:
> It would really help me if people who have used the
> Adobe Acrobat suite to
> create PDFs would share their experiences or issues.
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