Re: December 2002 issue of Intercom on PDF Book

Subject: Re: December 2002 issue of Intercom on PDF Book
From: Jean Hollis Weber <jean -at- jeanweber -dot- com>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Sun, 01 Dec 2002 20:04:56 -0800


Lorraine Kiewiet wrote,

In this month's Intercom, there is an article "Building a PDF Book". Maybe I am not reading this with my brain fully engaged, but I am not seeing the point of creating a manual in this way when it is so simple to take a document and use Acrobat Distiller to create the bookmarks for you.

Although I cannot find it in the article, perhaps the reason for this approach is that the book is hundreds of pages long, and we all know how Word cannot manage that. So it seems that the point is, if your company won't buy you FrameMaker and you need a 500 page book, here's how to do it.

The point of the article has nothing to do with whether MS Word can manage a large. (It can; I've done it often.)

The point, which I thought was stated quite clearly in the article, is that delivering one large PDF file is not always the best solution for the users. Why force users to download a several-megabyte file when all they want is one chapter or one section? It's often better to deliver a collection of PDFs with a contents page from which the user can select the required chapter or section and download that. The article describes a way to do this.

I enjoyed reading it because I had independently invented a similar solution for a client, to solve the same problem.

Regards, Jean
Jean Hollis Weber
jean -at- jeanweber -dot- com
The Technical Editors' Eyrie http://www.jeanweber.com/



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