Re: Adobe Acrobat

[Chet Ensign <Chet_Ensign%LDS -at- NOTES -dot- WORLDCOM -dot- COM>]

Janice McKibbon writes:

> Our department is about to undertake a large online documentation
> project using Adobe Acrobat.  I have seen some comments from fellow
> writers about using Acrobat and I would like to hear from you if you
> are using Acrobat to distribute online documentation on CD-ROM.  We
> will be creating a CD-ROM with an entire set of documents ranging in
> size from 60 pages to 1,600 pages.  We plan to update the PDF files
> with future releases, and I would really like to know if anyone has
> experience updating PDFs and how the hypertext links were maintained.

My experience has been that Acrobat is fine is you want to push printing
downstream to your customers. I haven't found many customers who are satisfied
using Acrobat documents on-screen. To make the documents satisfactory as
electronic documents, you have to put so much work into reformatting the print
version for the screen that you might just as well have do the thing in a
product optimized for on-line in the first place (Folio, Info Access, Viewer,
WinHelp to name just a few).

We satisfied a site-license requirement for a software product that way, and
the customers were satisfied. What they wanted was the right to make unlimited
copies of the documentation, so they expected to be copying and/or printing
anyway. Being able to print out just the pages they wanted when they wanted
them was great.

Best regards,

/chet

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Chet Ensign                          Phone: (908) 771-9221
Director, Electronic Publishing      Email: chet -at- lds -dot- com
Logical Design Solutions, Inc.       Email(home): censign -at- interserv -dot- com
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