RE: December 2002 issue of Intercom on PDF Book

["Lorraine Kiewiet" <Lorraine -dot- Kiewiet -at- mullinconsulting -dot- com>]

WOW Thanks! This is why I love Techwr-L!!

-----Original Message-----
From: Shlomo Perets [mailto:mtype -at- netvision -dot- net -dot- il]
Sent: Monday, December 02, 2002 11:53 PM
To: Lorraine Kiewiet
Cc: TECHWR-L
Subject: Re: December 2002 issue of Intercom on PDF Book



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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