Re: Seeking a solution (for Acrobat search)

[Bill Bledsoe <bill -at- ENVISION -dot- COM>]

Gang,

Going to chime in here....

We've had some problems with some incorrectly built indexes from Adobe
Catalog, with word mysteriously missing when we do some spot checks.
 Certainly could be PBCAK (pronounced PEB-CAK... problem between chair and
keyboard!) but we're just following the directions.  Also, the sparse
Acrobat documentation doesn't help matters either.  But, it is amazingly
effective in cross platform usability, and that's why we've stuck with it.

Bill H.  It "does" get better than Acrobat as far as searching is
concerned.  I've seen viewers with better search engines than the Verity
engine that comes with Acrobat.  Namely, Folio Views!

Folio eats the Verity engine for lunch as far as speed is concerned.  In
the same scenario that Bill H. presented, Folio would return your request
in less than a second!!  And, (sorry Lori L.) with the query templates you
can build (like html forms), indexes are absolutely unnecessary in Folio
(IMHO of course... your mileage may vary).  It also offers bonus features
such as

The only problem with Folio as it stands right now, it won't run native on
any UNIX platform...  It will work in some of the Windows emulators for
UNIX though, and it does cover the MAC too!  They even have an real-time
Infobase (that's what a Folio document is called) to HTML web server that
allows you to display Infobases in your Web Browser of your choice (which
would be another way to deploy on the UNIX side). A viewer for native UNIX
(Solaris, HPUX) will be out in 1st quarter '97 according to the folio
folks.

Want to find out more about folio?  try www.folio.com.  Or, MCA if you're
out there, you might want to chime in.

cheers,
*******************************************
 Bill Bledsoe
 Technical Communicator
 Envision Solutions
 SQA MGR/Process Lead
 bill -at- envision -dot- com
 or
 intlidox -at- anet-stl -dot- com

 "I'm out on a limb where the fun begins"
                Adrian Belew/The Bears
*******************************************

----------
From:   Bill Hartzer[SMTP:XBJH%mimi -at- MAGIC -dot- ITG -dot- TI -dot- COM]
Sent:   Friday, August 23, 1996 7:57 AM
To:     Multiple recipients of list TECHWR-L
Subject:        Re: Seeking a solution (for Acrobat search)

David Egyes said:

"Currently, we're using Adobe Acrobat. We'd like a viewer that offers a
better search facility."

David, have you heard the term, "it doesn't get better than this"?
Adobe Acrobat's search capability, in my opinion, is one of the best
ever produced, giving the user the capability to search 200,000 pages of
documentation in less than 10 seconds in most cases (depending on the
speed of the user's hardware).  If the doc is located on a hard drive
(rather than on a CD-ROM) it's even faster.

I'm really curious:  what types of problems/dilemmas have you been
having with Adobe's search capability?  I've _NEVER_ had any legitimate
complaints from my users about it.  They think it's unbelievable.  In
fact, just the other day I had a customer call me and complain; he said
that my product is not searching the 275,000 pages of doc that's on the
CD-ROM I sent him.  I asked him why, and he said, "it only takes 5
seconds to search...it couldn't possibly be searching all of the
documents."  I was able to prove it by asking him to find some obscure
term in an Acrobat file and then search for that term; it took about 5
seconds to find it.  Needless to say he ate his words.

<SNIPPED TO PASS THE BANDWIDTH SAVINGS ON TO YOU>

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