Adobe Acrobat News & Views Software Review

Chris Larsen Principal Consultant Management Process Integrators, Inc. (Scottsdale, Arizona) Originally published in News & Views September, 1995 issue. Copyright 1996 STC-Philadelphia Metro Chapter. For permission to reprint this article, contact the Managing Editor.

Wouldn't it be nice if you could compose a stunning document in your favorite Windows word processor and send it to anyboy with a Macintosh or a UNIX station without worrying about the fonts or applications you used? That's the hurdle jumped with portable document software, and Adobe Acrobat is the leader of the pack. The key is PDF Acrobat 2.0 is actually a suite of five utilities that create, view and enrich portable document format (PDF) files. A PDF file is an on-screen replica of the printed version of a document. All of the original document's typefaces, graphics, and layout become contained within the PDF file in such a way that it does not matter which fonts or applications exist on the computer of anybody who wants to read it. Fonts are embedded in the PDF file or are emulated with Adobe's Multiple Master technology. Acrobat software exists for Windows, DOS, Macintosh, and UNIX. The freely distributed Acrobat Reader is the minimum requirement for viewing PDF documents. You can get your copy from any number of sources, including CompuServe (GO ACROBAT) and several sites on the World-Wide Web (including Adobe's site at http://www.adobe.com). Exchange and PDFWriter If you want to create and enrich PDF documents as well as view them, you need Acrobat Exchange ($195). With Exchange, you create PDF versions of documents from any application that can print. Exchange comes with PDFWriter, which installs itself as just another printer driver in your operating environment. To create a PDF version of a document, you simply "print" the document using the PDFWriter driver instead of a regular printer driver. Do more than just read When you're viewing a PDF document in Reader or Exchange, you can copy text and paste it into other applications, often retaining much of its formatting. You can perform simple text searches in Reader, and and more complex, full-text searches in Exchange. You can page through a PDF document more or less like a book, displaying it at various positions and zoom levels. If hypertext links have been added, you can jump from one location to another, or from one PDF file to another in a collection. You can read annotations that look like "sticky notes." A PDF file can also contain segments called "articles" that let you scroll from one column to another instead of from page to page. You can set up Reader or Exchange to scroll automatically from page to page in a kind of full-screen slide presentation. Exchange is the tool for adding document-enriching features to PDF files. With Exchange, you can insert, delete, and re-order pages, create article segments, and add annotations and hyperlinks. (Acrobat 2.1, due this fall, also lets you add links to World-Wide Web sites.) You can also build a set of bookmarks that appear along the left margin and act as a kind of point-and-click table of contents. Alternatively, in that same margin you can place page thumbnails on which readers can click to navigate a document. Third-party plug-ins to Exchange deliver even more special features such as colored highlighting or support for pen-based markup. Distiller, catalog, and capture Exchange is not the only way to create PDF files. Acrobat Distiller reads in PostScript print files and writes out PDF documents. In other words, you can build a document in FrameMaker, print the document to a PostScript file, then process the PostScript file through Distiller to produce a PDF version of the document. This method has several advantages, especially if the originating application has an Acrobat-friendly PostScript driver that allows it to encode hyperlinks, annotations, and other PDF-enriching features in the PostScript stream. (FrameMaker 5, for example, has this capability.) The two other Acrobat applications include Catalog, which lets you build fully indexed and searchable collections of PDF files, and the recently released Capture, which converts scanned image files into PDF documents through what could be called a kind of high-level optical character recognition. Other advantages The virtues of PDF documents become more evident as you work with them. You save paper. You can more easily archive and route documents because of the multiple-platform support and the relatively small size of PDF files. (For example, a PDF version of News & Views can be distilled into about 100K bytes.) You can build a platform-independent, hypertext online help system. (All of Acrobat's online help is in PDF format.) Acrobat is not the only player in the portable document game. Similar products include Common Ground by No Hands Software Inc., Replica by Farallon Computing Inc., and WordPerfect Envoy. Each has its strengths. But Acrobat, brought to you by the people who invented PostScript, provides the best suite of integrated PDF tools, especially for those who are already used to publishing with PostScript.

Return to . . .

[News & Views] [STC-PMC Home] [STC Home Page]
Last updated: November 6, 1996 (wq)