Adobe Acrobat

[glanger@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Gary F. Langer)]

PKTers,

I'm reasonably familiar with Adobe Acrobat.  It's a very nice product and
really does what Lonnie suggests.  Any document that can be saved as a
postscript file can be converted to Acrobat's format (called PDF--portable
document format).  It can then be viewed by anyone who has an Acrobat
viewer, and printed.  It has a few shortcomings that have prevented many
people from jumping on its bandwagon.  One is that everyone who views an
Acrobat file must have an Acrobat viewer installed on their computer.  While
the viewer is free, getting it distributed and installed is a bit of a
hassle.  Another is that converting files to PDF format is not free ($140
sounds about right).  But what has most prevented its spread is that Acrobat
files tend to be kind of huge--larger than the ps files that they are
created from.  This makes for long download times and consumption of lots of
disk space.

Ric and I and the others at CSF are always considering file formats and ways
of taking advantage of the latest in telecommunications technology.  While
we are staying with postscript for now, we may well try to move to Acrobat,
or something like it, in the future.

If you've had any experience with Acrobat in your organization, let us know,
off-list.  You can send mail to Ric and me by addressing it to

holt_and_langer@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx


--Gary Langer