SMUG gets smart !



Author: Steve Kayner

Date: January, 1994

Keywords: Adobe Acrobat software known users newsletter

Text:
SMUG gets smart !
     By Steve Kayner, SMUG Member 
          Computers have changed the way we do business, and continuous
advancements are being made that promise even greater benefits in
productivity and cost savings. Some of these advances are obvious, like
the PowerPC, while others are more subtle.
          The Adobe Acrobat products have the potential to staunch the
flow of paper brought on by the computer revolution. Unfortunately, the
concept may take a while to catch on. 
          What is the concept? To provide the ability to view, cut and
paste, search text, create links, attach notes to, and print fully
formatted documents regardless of applications, fonts, or platforms. 
          Acrobat is not complicated to use, and can greatly simplify
and lower the cost of distributing documents. It will be necessary to
shift our way of thinking about information to take advantage of what
Adobe has made available to us. The technology is here today. Will we
be smart enough to pick it up and run with it? 
     Adobe Acrobat Starter Kit 
          The Kit includes licenses for 10 of the Mac or Windows
Acrobat Exchange, and 2 of the Mac or Windows Acrobat Distiller. The
Acrobat Starter kit weighs in at about 3 lbs., but oddly enough,
there's not one manual in the box. 
          Instead of manuals, the package includes a fistful of
four-page cards: Exchange Quick Reference, Distiller Quick Reference,
and Getting Started for both the Distiller and Exchange. There are
different cards for the Mac and Windows versions. They've made it that
simple - no manuals are needed. 
          There are plenty of diskettes: 7 for the Windows versions of
Distiller and Exchange, 10 for the Mac versions. There are 2 Mac disks
for the Adobe Postscript Printer Driver v8.01, and one disk containing
a PDF (Portable Document Format) file extolling the merits of Acrobat.
The package also includes the Font Reunion program, on the ''bundle
version'' 2.0b of the Type on Call CD-ROM, with no less than 265
typefaces just a credit card number away from being available for use. 
     Acrobat Exchange 
          Acrobat Exchange creates files  as a Chooser selectable
"driver." Exchange also allows creation of links, thumbnails, bookmarks
and notes in a document and permits electronic viewing of that
document. Exchange for Macintosh will work on all Macs from the Mac
Plus on up. 
          The minimum System is 6.0.5, and it requires at least 2MB of
application RAM, and 7.5MB of disk space for the installation (only
3.5MB once the installer has finished). The minimum equipment
requirements to run Acrobat Exchange for Windows are: 386 or 486
processor, Windows 3.1, 640 x 480 VGA display or better, and 4-8MB of
RAM. Acrobat Exchange will run on a 4MB machine, but 8MB is
recommended. 
          I started with the Mac version of Acrobat Exchange, which
uses the Apple Installer. Accepting the ''easy install'' option, a
folder called Acrobat Exchange was created, with 1.7MB worth of files
in it. Adobe Type Manager 3.6 (ATM) was installed and some of the basic
fonts were removed from the System file (System 7.0.1) and replaced
with Adobe equivalent bitmapped fonts. A couple of Multiple Master
fonts were also added. 
          Adobe outline fonts were installed into the Extensions
folder, along with Type Reunion and the PDFWriter (for 994K), and the
ATM Control Panel and a PDFWriter Shortcut were added to the Control
Panels folder (for 107K). 
          The installation must have been good for my System file,
which went from 1.7MB down to a svelte 1.4MB. The interactive Acrobat
Exchange Tour provides a quick way to get some hands on use of the
program. It's not complicated, and since there are no manuals with the
product, it makes sense that they provide this. The Tour takes about
10-15 minutes and gives a good feel for all the features of Acrobat
Exchange. 
          There are several text files with update information in them
and there are many incompatibilities that have been discovered. Some
have work-arounds, and others do not. Fortunately, none of them
required me to change my setup beyond increasing the memory allocation
for Exchange to 4000K, and the ATM cache to 512K. Owners of Apple's
Personal LaserWriter NT will need to look closely at the warnings for
that device. 
          After running the Tour and reading all the text files, I
tried creating a PDF file from a simple GraphMaster chart. Using the
Chooser to select the PDFWriter and send a print job to it worked well.
I then selected the LaserWriter IINT as the printer, and sent the PDF
chart to be printed. It was complete in less than 2 minutes. 
          I went back the original GraphMaster chart, and sent it to
the printer. It took nearly eight minutes to print without Acrobat. It
was faster to create the PDF file, open it in the Exchange and print
it, than continued on page 9 it was to print directly from GraphMaster.
Curious, that it works this way, but not bad. 
          The Acrobat Exchange is pretty cool stuff. It has VCR-type
buttons for navigation within a PDF file. It lets you place notes
represented by icons anywhere on a document, and when you double-click
that icon, the note pops open. It lets you place bookmarks, with
outline style notation, if desired. There are also tools for creating
links between parts of a document, and for searching for text within a
PDF file. 
          The Exchange can print color or black and white to both
PostScript and non-PostScript printers, and allows the user to cut and
paste text into other applications. PDF documents can also be collated
from one another to create new documents or extend existing ones. The
Exchange employs efficient compression techniques that result in
relatively compact files. 
          The viewing options are what sets Exchange apart from the
competition. It has tools for zooming in and out from 25% to 800%, and
there are buttons for viewing at actual size, full width, and full
page. It also has the capability to create thumbnail images of all
pages. Then, using the thumbnails you can navigate around the document
by pointing and clicking on them, or by dragging the view box within
the thumbnail of the currently displayed page. 
     Acrobat Distiller 
          Distiller creates documents in pdf file format with embedded
fonts and EPS graphics from PostScript files made by any program.The
Distiller offers an excellent selection of graphics compression and
downsampling options and also will generate thumbnail images. 
          The minimum requirements for running the Macintosh version of

Distiller are steep: a 68020 or greater processor, System 6.05 or
greater, and a minimum of 6MB of RAM (12MB recommended). The minimum
equipment requirements to run Distiller for Windows are steeper yet:
386 or 486 processor (387 math coprocessor recommended for Distiller),
Windows 3.1, 640 x 480 VGA display or better, and 8- 12MB of RAM.
Acrobat Distiller for Windows will run on an 8MB machine, but 12MB is
recommended. 
          My first victim was an 8MB Mac IIci with a meager array of
INITs with virtual memory turned on. Installation of the Acrobat
Distiller went smoothly, placing the 1.6MB Distiller application on the
startup drive. (The installation replaced the mini-ATM Font Database
with the full version. Also, a prior installation of the Acrobat Reader
or the Acrobat Exchange is needed if ATM 3.6 is not already in place.) 
          Just for grins, I next created PostScript files from a number
of applications, and ran them through the Distiller. Using a variety of
the new LaserWriter 8 driver options for creating the PostScript files:
ASCII, binary, PostScript Levels 1 & 2, and font inclusion, I Distilled
five documents. 
          A complex, multilayered 39K Canvas chart became a 5K PDF file
after 3:06 minutes. A 39K, one-page, Word 5.1 document became a 12 PDF
file in 56 seconds. A 7 page, 230K, Word 5.1 document with PICT
graphics and lots of tables became a 24K PDF file in a mere 1:40
minutes. A 308K GraphMaster chart became a 12K PDF file in just under 2
minutes, and a simple 17K MacDraw II file became a 5K PDF file in 25
seconds. 
          There were two errors reported by the scrolling text field
displayed by the Distiller during its handiwork. The Geneva and Chicago
fonts could not be found, and were replaced with Courier in the
GraphMaster and MacDraw documents. These two fonts were resident in an
active suitcase that was being tracked by Suitcase II v2.12 (this being
a System 7.0.1 machine). The Distiller was searching its own fonts
folder and the System file for its fonts, and missed those provided by
Suitcase. 
          All of the Distilled PDF files opened without problems and
printed nicely using the Acrobat Exchange program. The output was
essentially the same as the output from the original creator
applications, except for the Courier font substitution in two of the
files. 
          I had no trouble installing the Adobe Exchange and Distiller
for Windows on an 8MB IBM computer (except for the call to IBM tech
support to get the damn thing to boot, but that's another story for a
long, cold, dark winter's night...). The two programs worked fine in
the Windows environment and PDF documents created on one platform
worked equally as well on the other. It should be noted that PostScript
files are also transportable, at least from the Mac to the IBM. 
          After some experimentation, I finally got down to the real
task at hand. I used PageMaker 5.0 on a PowerBook 170 to generate a
3.7MB PostScript file from a 10 page newsletter with lots of small
graphics. In 13 minutes I had it Distilled down to a 345K PDF file. 
          I was astonished when I moved the newsletter PDF file to a
color machine and viewed it with Acrobat Exchange. There were colors in
the graphics on several pages of the newsletter. 
          Our goal for using Acrobat has been to create an online
version of Known Users (the newsletter of the Sequoia Macintosh Users'
Group), which will help reduce our expenses. We had tried another
portable document program, but its embedable mini-viewer lacked the
ability to zoom, and couldn't do justice to the 9 point text that we
use. We tried to negotiate a deal for a site license for a package with
the zooming feature, but the publisher was not interested in such a
small quantity (~100 users). 
          From its first announcement, we were very interested in using
Adobe's suite of Acrobat products, but initially the cost of providing
the Acrobat Reader, which allows electronic viewing (only) of the docs
created by Distiller and Exchange, to our user group members was
prohibitive. However, recent releases of Adobe products on CD- ROM have
included the Acrobat Reader at no extra cost. The free Software
Dispatch CD-ROM that Apple is giving away, (call 1-800- 937-2828
extension 600 to take advantage of the offer), also includes the
Acrobat Reader. 
          So, while the Acrobat Reader will not become freeware, it is
being distributed in a manner that is much more likely to make Acrobat
the standard for portable document distribution. There are presently
Readers available for Macintosh, Windows, DOS and Unix. In their effort
to bring all of us up to speed on this new concept of document
distribution, Adobe Press (through Prentice Hall) has published a small
paperback book titled ''Beyond Paper'' (ISBN 1- 56830-050-6, $16.95). 
          ''Beyond Paper'' is aimed at businesses, and provides clear
examples of how to employ Acrobat and what benefits can be realized by
doing so. Included are real world examples of cost savings and how they
are achieved. If the Acrobat concept sounds appealing, this book goes a
long way toward clarifying the future of documents. 
          The Adobe Acrobat Starter Kit $1395 list, $669 street, is
availabe from: 
          Adobe Systems Incorporated 
          P.O. Box 7900 
          Mountain View, CA 94039-7900       1-800-862-3623

Copyright © january, 1994 by Steve Kayner