If you are going to work with any electronic documents, and you need a solution which will work on virtually every computer platform available, there really is only one choice: Adobe Acrobat.
Acrobat lets you distribute documents electronically over the Internet, via CD-ROM, or any other type of medium. With the free Adobe Acrobat Reader, anyone can read your document.
Let’s say you have to create a user agreement for a company Intranet. While you may not know which word processing program each user has, you do want them to be able to download and print the agreement. In times past, you would either have to provide multiple copies of the document in various formats (MS Word, ClarisWorks, Word Perfect, etc.) or post a simple text-based document any word processor can open. The latter is a poor choice, as you are very limited to layout and design. No company logo, no forms, nothing at all which may make the user agreement easier for the end user to use. With Adobe Acrobat, the problem is solved! You simply use your favorite program, such as MS Word, and save it as a Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) file.
Creating a PDF file on a Macintosh is simplicity itself. Simply install the program; choose Adobe PDFWriter in the chooser, and "print" your document. You simply select the attributes you want the PDF to have, and save it to disk. All done! (Almost.)
What is Acrobat, really? It is really a collection of programs you use to create a PDF document. Included with Acrobat are Acrobat PDFWriter, Acrobat Distiller, Acrobat Scan, and Adobe Capture plug-in. Together, these programs allow you to create a PDF document from a variety of sources. You can scan in a document and save it in PDF format, or create an electronic document (in another program such a Work or Illustrator) and save it in PDF format. Rather than go into every one of these, I will look at electronic created content, as that is what I'm familiar with.
As I said, you simply "print" you document after choosing "PDFWriter" in the chooser, or set up a keyboard shortcut to do the same. (For instance, if I hold down Option-Control and choose "Print," it will export my document as a PDF, thus saving a trip to the chooser.) This is a very nice feature, and should allow even a novice to use Acrobat.
What can your PDF document have in it? Sure, you can have a text-only document, but what fun is that? You can also incorporate graphics, sounds, and movies right into your PDF file. The best part is that the size of the finished product will be much smaller than, for example, a Macromedia Director file. This is because Acrobat has its own compression software, meaning large files will be much easier to download or share.
Acrobat also allows you to embed a font (or fonts) into your document, thus solving an age-old problem with creating text documents. Previously, your document looked great on your end, but the person you sent it to might not have the same fonts, causing your document to look very different at best, and garish at worst. Adobe's Portable Document Format eliminates that problem.
Another great feature of a PDF file is that you can embed it with links. Say you're preparing a manual for your software project. Rather than refer to different page numbers in your manual and hope the end user will not get lost, you can have some text or graphics actually be a link which a user can merely click to go right to that page. That same click could also send the user to an altogether different document. In fact, a click on one of those links could even launch a web browser and go on-line to a webpage!
It's difficult to write a review of a program that does so much without getting too wordy. Let me just say, then, that Acrobat is a wonderful and necessary program for those working with documentation. In fact, in the next major release of the Mac OS (Mac OS X), PDF will become a standard, replacing the PICT format. So Mac users will have no trouble at all opening and viewing your Acrobat document; it will become part of the Macintosh Operating System.
Adobe will soon be releasing version 4.0, and we will review that update in an upcoming issue. Adobe promises some new features and improved reliability, though I understand the Windows version will (at least initially) have more features than the Mac version. But we'll have to wait and see.
•Tim Robertson• <Publisher@mymac.com>
Websites mentioned:
<http://www.adobe.com>
 
<http://www.smalldog.com>
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