PDF News and Tips
Q1, 2004

PDF Expert Tips: Using PDF for Presentations

PowerPoint is a fantastic tool for building presentations. It performs less well, however, in the delivery. After all... not everyone has Powerpoint! Even if they do, Powerpoint files are often large, remain editable and deliver different and sometimes poor results on different computers. Do you want web site visitors fiddling with your Powerpoint files? Nope!

In most cases, Adobe PDF files are a better solution for presentation delivery. The key point here is that the Adobe Reader is a totally generic piece of software, installed on almost all computers, and delivering consistant performance from Windows 95 to Max OS X. PDF files are smaller, easier to manage, may be easily secured against editing and operate reliably on almost all computing platforms.

To get the best results out of your PDF presentation, follow these basic steps:

1. Create your PDF presentation using Acrobat Distiller or the PDFMaker button on your PowerPoint toolbar.
2. Set your PDF file to open "Fit Page" or "Full Screen" as desired. This is important, because otherwise users might only see part of the first page.
3. Secure your PDFs against change, or prohibit the extraction of copying of images and text.

With a few simple operations, all of which may be collected together and as a single Batch operation, PDF files are an easy, highly effective and totally reliable presentation platform for any user with the full version of Acrobat.

Get PDF Tips in your mailbox » SIGN UP NOW

ePublishing Revenue Calculator 2.1 now available!

DSI's ePublishing Revenue Calculator 2.1 is intended to help publishers assess the revenue potentials from electronic distribution of historical, topical or advertising-driven content models. The 2.1 version of the Revenue Calculator includes:

++ Dynamic 4 year projections for up to 6 revenue models including retail sales, trade shows, sponsorship, catalog distribution, web site content and other revenue streams.

++ Development options ranging from scanning and conversion to web-content development and HTML production. In addition to a capital cost analysis, the Calculator accounts for CD-ROM development, marketing and fulfillment charges, as well as acquisition of epublishing rights for legacy content.

Please contact Duff Johnson at 617-283-4226 to request a copy of the ePublishing Revenue Calculator 2.1 at no charge!

View a sample report from the Revenue Calculator.

Document Scanning 101

These days, scanners are cheap. Since photocopiers have gotten into the scanning act, it's becoming as routine to scan as it is to copy or fax. Scanning must be just as easy as photocopying or faxing, or so goes the refrain. As with so many other things, what might appear to be true... isn't.

It's all a question of what you are willing to live with. When photocopying, there is no need to make a machine-readable image. Because people are more tolerant than machines, warps, distortions, skew, black borders and bad orientation are acceptable - on paper. But when scanning, you are going for something different, and the results show it.

Poorly scanned documents, or improperly indexed, sorted or categorized documents reduce usability "downstream" from the point of scanning - sometimes to the point of uselessness, and without adequate quality control - forever. Users experience the results as missed document breaks, poor OCR results, illegible pages, and lost documents. Those who wish to edit text (ie, OCR the image) quickly learn that only the best scans will do... but they usually don't know how to get there from here.

Happily, the basic principals of effective document scanning are few and easy to learn... if anyone would bother teaching them. At DSI, we tend to summarize them as follows. (a) ALWAYS plan out the project, from scanner resolution to file names, BEFORE turning on the scanner. (b) Always scan documents to bi- tonal (black and white) images unless you NEED color or grayscale for a SPECIFIC reason. Most business document scanning never needs color or grey scans. (c) The best time and place for quality-control of your images is BEFORE taking them to the next step, whatever that may be (PDF conversion, indexing, etc). QA directly after scantime is best.

Learn more about DSI's scanning services and solutions.

Acrobat 6.0: Focus on Navigation

One of the principal advantages of the PDF format is the ability to deliver so much more of a document than mere text. In Acrobat 6.0, the PDF format, which steps up to 1.5, does not add many navigation features to the PDF specification - which was pretty mature along these lines in the previous 1.4 specification, the Acrobat 5.0 iteration.

The changes in the Acrobat program in terms of document navigation are fairly subtle, and (we think) will tend to confuse users who've seen the navigational method essentially unchanged since version 2.01 of the software. Of low real significance, but high confusion potential, the "forward" and "back" buttons, for both page and session, are now on the BOTTOM of the viewer window, not the TOP. It took us a minute...

There are now more options available for Bookmarks, including a deceptively small but nonetheless VERY welcome change... bookmark text can now Wrap within the Bookmark window. The result - long chapter titles and section headings are readable without changing window sizes, etc.

This single (and simple!) change immensely improves the utility of Bookmarks, while also removing one of the biggest headaches in deploying accessible PDFs, Bookmarks are now a robust and reliable built in navigation system for any document! Any user with the full version of Acrobat can add bookmarks with zero training. Documents and their Tables of Contents and / or interactive indexes are completely self-contained, predictable and easy to use. You can do it all in one simple PDF!