Number 202 - March 2000

Adobe(R) Acrobat(R): Juggling many tasks
By Milo Sarchet, Tacoma Open Group
Most of us have never given much thought about what is Adobe Acrobat. If I needed an article from a web site that had to have Adobe Reader to view, I just downloaded the free copy from a web page and never had to do anything again when viewing Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) files because they would open automatically. Unless you are writing items for web pages or publications, you will probably not have the need to ever use Adobe Acrobat. We only use Acrobat Reader for reading articles from most commercial or organization web sites.     However, it is wise to know how Adobe Acrobat works. Adobe Acrobat is a moving target. It's hard to pin down because it can be used for many different tasks. During the years it has been available, it has evolved into new areas. The longer Acrobat is around, the more appropriate its name seems.     Acrobat was designed to be a cross-platform, paperless document exchange format. Acrobat Portable Document Format files (PDF) can be viewed and printed by anybody, regardless of their computer platform, and without the need for the original authoring program, the original graphics files, or the original fonts. In other words, I can write a document in Word and lay it out in QuarkXPress with graphics from PhotoShop on my Windows, convert it to an Acrobat PDF file, and send it to a friend who can view it on his Mac. My friend only needs a copy of Acrobat Reader, which is available free to users of Macs, Windows, and DOS. The document looks just the	same on a Mac computer as it looked on my Windows. This is quite an accomplishment in a world of conflicting "standards."     Recently, Acrobat has become even more universal, assuming an important place on the World Wide Web and becoming significant in the pre-press industry. It is on the World Wide Web where you are going to come into contact with Acrobat Reader, the viewing program.     The secret to its success is that Acrobat can embed all of the data necessary to view or print a document into a single, self-contained Acrobat PDF file. The original graphics files, as well as, all of the necessary typefaces are compressed and embedded directly in the PDF file. Surprisingly, the resulting PDF file might actually be smaller than the original document, meaning that emailing these files, or downloading them from the Web, is reasonable. This article is 22 KB as a Word document and only 7 KB as Adobe. Big difference when storage is critical.     One final feature of Acrobat is the ability to provide security to the PDF file thus setting up a password to not allow any of the following: printing, changing of document, selecting text and graphics for copying, adding or changing notes and form fields attached.     I have found this program to be an outstanding one, albeit challenging. It has given me a few extra gray hairs in learning how to fully use it, but worth the effort!
Number 202 - March 2000