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Subject:Re: PDF documentation and client delivery From:Matt Craver <MCraver -at- OPENSOLUTIONS -dot- COM> Date:Tue, 14 Jul 1998 09:37:41 -0400
Becky Roberts [jbroberts -at- KNOLOGY -dot- NET] wrote:
>1. If you deliver Acrobat files to clients, how do you ensure that the
>client has the reader loaded so that they can open the files?
>
>2. Please assure me that there are other folks out there who do this
>kind of delivery. Management is now looking at me and questioning why
I
>think PDF is such a good idea.
We write a software application for small banks in the US, and we now
deliver most of our documentation on CD as PDF's. This has resulted in
definite, quantifiable savings for us because the writers now do not
have to worry about production issues (giving us more time to write) and
production and shipping costs for the documentation have dropped
greatly. The clients like it because they receive a manual that looks
the same without any "funny" page breaks or other nonsense whichever
printers they use. These issues have vastly outweighed the very small
effort needed to support the new technology.
We have done a couple of things to ease installation of the Reader for
our clients. Like you, we included a Readme file, but we also sent a
cover letter with the installation instructions. As Heather said, we
make sure the Reader InstallShield program is the only thing besides the
Readme in the root directory of the CD. This under the theory that when
a user pops in the CD, their first action is going to be to click on any
program they see in the root. We are now going to add an Autorun.inf
file to the CD's root directory that will launch the installation
program to further reduce the possibility of error.
Of course, what we cannot do for the user is actually load the CD.
There are users that get the CD and throw it in a desk drawer. But you
cannot _force_ a user to read documentation, no matter what the
distribution media. All you can do is make good tools available, and
the Reader has been a very good one for us.
-Matthew Craver,
Technical Documentation
Open Solutions Inc.
Mcraver -at- opensolutions -dot- com
