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PDF
files are the greatest thing since sliced bread
for crossing platform boundaries...
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For
those of you who aren't familiar, PDF files (portable
document format) were created by Adobe
as a cross platform solution to the problem of moving
documents, with their attending fonts and graphic
files, between incompatible platforms lacking the
originating application. It (PDF)
has been gaining momentum over the last few years
as the technology has improved and become accepted
as an emerging industry standard for the archiving
and distribution of government documents. It's also
rapidly becoming the format of choice for commercial
publishers and printers.
PDF
files and Adobe Acrobat in general have come a long
way since version 2. The latest version of the Acrobat
Distiller (3.2) does a very quick, predictable job
of converting Postscript print files into PDF documents.
This is probably my most often used path for creating
a PDF file: from a quark document I will save the
file as Postscript by selecting the distiller PDF
in the Quark print setup dialog, then print to a
Postscript (Binary w/ all fonts) file. I've found
that the Acrobat Distiller is the most reliable
way to convert from a commercial page layout program.
There are some cases where the PDFwriter print driver
is able to handle the job, but for the potential
complex layouts that can be created in a page layout
program, your beat bet is still the Distiller.
I
do want to mention that notable improvements have
been made in the PDFwriter print driver in it's
current version. Prior versions had a tendency to
mishandle eps images that contained clipping paths
and 1 bit tiffs with zero backgrounds. This doesn't
seem to be the case in my personal experience with
the PDFwriter.
One
issue that limits my use of the PDFwriter is a compatibility
problem I've experienced with the PDFwriter and
desktop printing that cause a system crash when
changing from a Postscript print driver to the PDFwriter
in both versions 3.0 & 3.01 of the PDFwriter
and Mac OS 7.6 & 8.1. The problem does not occur
when switching from the PDFwriter back to a Postscript
driver.
That
said, I can't think of a better way to distribute
small, high print quality documents complete with
fonts and print resolution graphics.
Next
time I will explore the features that you can add
to your documents with Exchange, the third component
of Acrobat and the extended functionality that the
many third party
plug-ins that are coming available can add.
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