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Re: December 2002 issue of Intercom on PDF Book

Subject: Re: December 2002 issue of Intercom on PDF Book
From: Shlomo Perets <mtype -at- netvision -dot- net -dot- il>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Tue, 03 Dec 2002 09:53:18 +0200



Lorraine,

You 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.

Regardless of the tools used to author the PDFs, and unless the
intended use is print-only -- a manual can benefit from conversion to
a set of interlinked PDFs (each chapter being a separate PDF) rather
than to a single-file PDF. When done properly, benefits include:

- Acrobat Search can be more efficient (assuming that each chapter
has unique Title, Keywords fields - readers are able to select the
chapter of interest as the starting point, without having to click
"Next Highlight" repeatedly (until they give up)

- Reader orientation is improved, if the specific title is displayed
in the title bar

- Cross-chapter links may open the target chapter in a separate window

- Overall performance is better, especially with larger manuals

The combined file size of the separate chapters is larger than a single
file, especially when fonts are embedded (recommended), but this
is generally not a major consideration.

See my "PDF Best Practices" articles (especially #5 and #6) for more details
(http://www.microtype.com/resources2.html#PDFBestPractices).


Shlomo Perets

MicroType * http://www.microtype.com
FrameMaker, Acrobat training & consulting * FM-to-Acrobat TimeSavers/Assistants





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