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Introducing ED with PDF
Many companies have tried creating electronic documentation (ED) software. Apple gave us DocViewer, Farallon tried Replica, Green Mountain Software tried DocMaker. Most have failed for two simple reasons. The first and most important is that we no longer live in an isolated computing environment. Some people use Windows or OS/2, some Macintosh, others Unix; many use a variety of operating systems. A practical ED system needs to work seamlessly on all platforms.
The second reason is that the creation process for electronic documentation needs to encompass existing work practices, otherwise someone has to learn a new method. PostScript is the power underlying most quality DTP packages, and this is one reason why Adobe's ED technology will has prospered. (The other is that Adobe has developed a version of its software for most platforms concurrently, and has shipped its Acrobat Reader application as a kind of "freeware" through a wide variety of routes.) Adobe's ED technology is called Portable Document Format (PDF); its reader application is called Acrobat Reader. PDF files are cross-platform compatible so few platform-specific alterations need to be made to the files before shipping them. PDF files can contain text, fonts, pictures and colour, but also more importantly the growing collection of other elements that make up an electronic document - movies, sounds and music, hypertext and interdocument links.
The Acrobat Reader application displays the document on all computers in the same way as the document appeared in its original form. This document cannot be edited, but can be printed even if the end user does not have the fonts used in the file loaded on their computer. Many people use PDFs to transfer documents that need to be proofed remotely but which by using other techniques (like sending a QuarkXPress file with associated images and fonts) would take too long and still not display correctly. But there are other uses for PDF files, not least of which is the ability to create software manuals (for example, see the Illustrator 6.0 manual), electronic magazines, newspapers and other long documents and place them on the Web, or email them as one would a printed magazine.
Adobe has also joined forces with Netscape who has developed a plugin for the Navigator Web browser to display PDF pages in the browser window. With such ease of access to the Acrobat Reader application (you can get a copy from Adobe), documents that can be displayed on most computer platforms, a growing band of other companies fighting to develop an industry standard for ED software and an increasing preference for nonpaper products, I imagine we will be seeing enormous enahancments to Adobe's Acrobat Reader and the PDF documentation system in the future.
Written by Geoffrey Fletcher
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