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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 (3.01).
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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