Acrobat and FrameMaker5

[Tracey Showalter <tshowalt -at- SCTCORP -dot- COM>]

Anil Jain asked about possible problems with using Acrobat and Frame for
E-docs.

I'm interested in the same topic. My company is about to convert our files
from Word 5.1 (Mac) to FM5 and will be shipping our doc on CD-ROM using .pdf
files. We've tested some of these features, but haven't yet worked with them
in a full-blown setting yet.

This is what our testing has yielded:


re:
1. When you create a .PDF file using Acrobat, are the hypertext links
embedded in the original Frame file preserved?  In other words, do you have
to insert the links all over again in the Acrobat file?

FM5 has built-in support for Acrobat files; you select Acrobat support options
when you print to the PostScript file. You can specify if you want existing FM
hypertext links to appear in the .pdf file, whether or not you want them to
appear as bookmarks, and how you'd like those bookmarks to appear.


re:
2. How easy (or difficult) is it to create Acrobat files when your Frame
files are in a book. Does Acrobat allow cross-file hpertext links and search
capabilities ?

When you print a file from the book window, your usual printer driver dialog
box opens. Since this is where you enter the Acrobat setup options, you can
still generate hypertext links from a book. I haven't worked too much with it,
but it looks like you set up the Acrobat options one time for all the files in
the book that you're printing.


re:
3. Are there any cross-platform viewing/printing problems that you've
encountered for the .PDF files?

None so far. A problem we have encountered is getting a screen capture bitmap,
be it tiff, pcx, pict, etc., to appear identical in FM5/Mac and FM5/Windows.
So far, the same image that appears fine in HiJaak/Win, FM5/Mac, Acrobat/Mac,
Acrobat/Windows, looks *horrible* in FM5/Windows (and FM4/Windows too). We
have not figured this one out yet. And if the yucky looking FM5/Windows
capture is printed to .pdf from Windows Distiller, it looks awful everywhere.
If it's printed to .pdf from Mac Distiller, it looks fine everywhere.

But this seems more like a Frame filter problem than a cross-platform or
Acrobat problem.


Hope this helps.

Tracey Showalter
tshowalt -at- sctcorp -dot- com