[WEB4LIB] Adobe Acrobat

[Jim Harold]

Hi ....

We have converted over 2200 documents and made them available in PDF format.  They have been loaded into BASIS, our DBMS and are available after searching the BASIS WEBserver interface.

We had been using Acrobat 3.0 but have now most of us have upgraded to 4.0.

Some insights:

1. 4.0 allows you to pull in documents directly into the application without having to print from the original application.  However, sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn't.  One things we noticed is that Acrobat is looking for specific file extension when it attempts to pull in a document.  For example, it wants WordPerfect files to have the extension 'wpd'.  We had hundreds of files with 'wp5' or 'wp6' as the extension and it didn't like this at all.

2. 4.0 allows you to bring web pages directly.  This is good and bad.  If you are planning to do this, you might have to clean it up in Acrobat by removing extraneous links, graphics, etc.  This might be better done by copying or spidering the document to your PC and removing with an editor, then posting to a server and then at the last step, pull into Acrobat.  Tedious but it is the better thing to do.

3. Sometimes Acrobat gets confused when it gets to a page that is formatted differently than the preceding pages.  So it prompts you to save the next section with another name.  Then it will prompt you for a third name for the next section again, this being for the third section.  This happens mostly with tables that have a different orientation that is 90 degrees from the regular pages (oh, and how the authors of the documents we convert love to use tables!)  You then need to 'insert' the second, third, etc., sections into the first saved PDF and save again.  The big thing is that you need to be aware that it is converting the document in sections and not assume that it somehow just needs the first file name you typed again.

4. Always 'optimize'.  As I understand optimizing does two things.  One is that in many cases the file size will be reduced significantly (again sometimes it does this and sometimes not); the second is that it is set up for 'byte serving' (and I might be wrong here).  There has to be something on the server that actually does this because even though we optimize everything now, the BASIS WEBserver still does not do this.

5. Images in WordPerfect docs (can't remember about MS Word ones) are flipped top to bottom when the PDF is produced.  My work around, of course, it to flip it in the WP document first and then produce the PDF.

6. Last but not least, is that all of the problems do not happen to everyone here that produces PDF files.  One person has none of them at all!  You probably will have problems that no one else has.  The big thing is to look for patterns in the problems that you do encounter so that have a plan of action when it occurs again.

Overall, even with all these inconsistencies, Acrobat is amazing.  Wouldn't be without it.

Jim Harold
USAID Development Experience Clearinghouse
Arlington VA USA

>>> Andrew Mutch <amutch at waterford.lib.mi.us> 07/02/99 10:10AM >>>

I'm interested in hearing from anyone who uses Adobe Acrobat to create PDF
documents for their web sites.  Specifically, I was hoping to hear your
experiences using this software including:

- ease of use
- quality of documents
- difficulties/things to be aware of
- integration into web site

Also, I would be especially interested in hearing from people who are also using
the Adobe Document Server and whether you would recommend it.

Thanks!

Andrew Mutch
Library Systems Technician
Waterford Township Public Library
Waterford, MI

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