Re: Frame and PDF

["Mary S. Hutson" <ms -dot- hutson -at- PTI-US -dot- COM>]

I've been lurking for a few days and am amazed at all the knowledge out
there, and also at how much I've taught myself over the past year+. I'm the
lone documentation person at a company that writes sophisticated analysis
software for the power engineering niche. I function as an editor, writer,
designer, help file person, and also put selected files on the web in HTML
format. It's just starting to get interesting as we undertake some intense
development efforts. We just issued our first set of online docs using
Acrobat last March. Here's what I know:

John Russell writes:

>In writing directly to .pdf format, are all links in the Frame document =
>retained?

I used the Distiller and not the PDF Writer to process our files because the
links were not processed adequately using the Writer. With the Distiller,
you print to a postscript file and must have a printer driver that
accommodates postscript and color printing (if you want your hypertext links
in color). You then process the postscript file through the Distiller. Links
will be retained but they are path and file name specific. PDF files must
have the same directory structure as the original documentation. If you
distill a book file, you lose your links between files because you're losing
your path and file name. I ended up putting the book files and TOCs in a
root directory with the chapters in a subdirectory for each manual to
preserve the links in the TOCs and protect all links between manuals.

>  Or (as my limited understanding of Adobe Acrobat goes), would =
>I still have to go in and manually re-create all my hypertext links =
>within each document?

Frame 5.1.1 on NT has a bug: it sometimes sticks extra characters in the
path name of the link, making them ineffective. You can go in and edit the
postscript file with a text editor and take the extra characters out. For
me, it was inserting '.F' between the file name and the file name extension,
so I had to edit the F out of it.

I found that the extra characters weren't always included, but couldn't
discern a pattern to when it did it and when it didn't.

This bug is supposed to have been fixed with release 5.1.2, due out last
May, but I haven't gotten my upgrade yet.


>Also, does this feature come standard with Frame 5 or is it an add on =
>filter?

I didn't do anything special to get this feature, so I assume it's included
with either Frame or Acrobat. Acrobat also has some printer drivers included
with it, unfortunately not the one I needed.

Hope this helps.
Mary S. Hutson
Documentation Specialist
Power Technologies, Inc.
ms -dot- hutson -at- pti-us -dot- com
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