The 'acrobatic' way to share your documents with others<\/p>\n
By Zatni Arbi<\/p>\n
JAKARTA (JP): A colleague, Bayu, recently sent me a short e-
\nmail. \"I want to send you an invitation, but I want to make sure
\nit will be OK as the file size is 350 KB.\"<\/p>\n
I was extremely appreciative, as what he did was the most
\nappropriate thing. Before sending over a large file to me, he
\nasked me first whether it would not cause me any problem.<\/p>\n
I replied that there would be no problem as the size of his
\nfile was only 350 KB. Besides, I had a 24-hour connection to the
\nInternet through KabelVision and I had set my Outlook Express to
\ndownload e-mail messages automatically every three minutes.<\/p>\n
Within one hour, I received his very attractive wedding
\ninvitation -- in a sleek, self-running PowerPoint presentation.<\/p>\n
Contrast what he did with some others who simply dump half a
\ndozen high-resolution picture files up to 900 KB each into my
\nmailbox without notifying me beforehand. Not surprisingly, if my
\nPC happens to be turned off at that time I will end up with a
\nclogged e-mail system, since my mailbox quota at pop.cbn.net.id
\nis only 5 MB.<\/p>\n
The real problem with a clogged mailbox is that, each time the
\nquota is exceeded, the next e-mail message that comes knocking at
\nmy CBN account will be rejected and bounce back to its sender. As
\nI rely so much on e-mail for my work, you would not be surprised
\nto see me more than just frowning when that happens.<\/p>\n
What makes it even worse is that, almost every time, I had no
\nreal use of the huge image files that come with those press
\nreleases!<\/p>\n
If you share long documents with a lot of graphics and images
\nwith other people over the Internet, you can do at least two
\nthings in their favor.<\/p>\n
First, let each of the recipients know first that you are
\nabout to send him one or more large files. They may have to
\ndownload these files one at a time to avoid clogging, and this is
\neven more crucial if they have a slow dialup connection to the
\nInternet.<\/p>\n
Second, you can use the popular WinZip or PKZip utilities to
\ncompress the file so that the size is reduced before you send it
\nover the Internet.<\/p>\n
But, what would you do if you want to share a neatly formatted
\ndocument with other people and you want it to look to them
\nexactly how it looks to you?<\/p>\n
If you use the standard Word format, problems may emerge if
\nyou happen to use fonts that are not available on the other
\npeople's systems. This can cause changes in the document layout
\nand formatting, and they will not be able to see the result of
\nyour hours of efforts in trying to make it look so professionally
\ndesigned.<\/p>\n
Solution<\/p>\n
One solution, which has increasingly become the standard, is
\nto use Acrobat from Adobe Corporation. With Acrobat, all the
\nfonts, layout and other formatting aspects of the document will
\nremain relatively intact despite the differences in hardware and
\nsoftware that we may use.<\/p>\n
One thing that should be noted here is that a document created
\nwith Acrobat may be larger than the original, because it contains
\nthe fonts, etc. In my experiment, for example, a 26 KB file
\ncreated in Microsoft Word became a 69 KB after conversion into an
\nAcrobat file.<\/p>\n
It must have happened to you: Someone sent you a file with
\nthe .PDF extension following the filename, and when you clicked
\non the file name it would come out in Acrobat Reader. PDF stands
\nfor Portable Document Format. This format, created by Adobe, was
\nmeant to enable us to share documents from a broad range of
\nsources (Web, Microsoft Office, etc.).<\/p>\n
To be able to open and view the file, your recipients are not
\nrequired to have the same program as you do. For example, if you
\ncreate your document in Excel, they do not have to have Excel in
\ntheir computer. All they need is a free utility called Acrobat
\nReader. We can download this utility from a lot of download
\nsites, including Adobe's own website (www.adobe.com). Acrobat
\nReader can be plugged in into your Web browser, such as the
\nInternet Explorer.<\/p>\n
However, creating a PDF file -- which is how an Acrobat file
\nis popularly called -- requires the full version of Acrobat
\n(US$249). In fact, Adobe has just released a new version of the
\nprogram, Version 5.0.<\/p>\n
During the installation, two buttons are added on a new
\ntoolbar in Word, Excel and PowerPoint if you have Microsoft
\nOffice on your system. To create a PDF file from an Office
\ndocument, all we need to do is click on the Convert to Adobe PDF
\nbutton. The other button will do the same thing plus create a
\nblank e-mail form with the PDF attached so that you can send it
\nout right away.<\/p>\n
Features<\/p>\n
New in Acrobat 5.0 is the feature that extracts an RTF (Rich
\nText File) file from a website, as you can see in the
\naccompanying picture.<\/p>\n
What I did was open The Jakarta Post webpage in Acrobat 5.0,
\nand my PC automatically accessed the Internet to download the
\npage. The page was displayed perfectly as if I was using Internet
\nExplorer (pictured at left). All the links were live and I could
\nclick on any of them. The linked page would be displayed, and I
\ncould choose to have it displayed in Acrobat or in a Web browser
\nsuch as Internet Explorer or Netscape.<\/p>\n
Acrobat 5.0 can also extract all the images in a PDF file or a
\nWeb page and save them in TIFF, JPEG or PNG file format. Too bad
\nwe do not have any control of which image to extract, as Acrobat
\nwill simply extract all the images and save them on the hard
\ndisk.<\/p>\n
Also new in Acrobat 5.0 is the facility to add comments and
\nread comments attached by others to a document. We can even do
\nthis online, making Acrobat 5.0 a suitable environment for
\ncollaboration.<\/p>\n
Its document security feature has also been improved. We can
\nprevent the document from being printed out or changed by
\nunauthorized people. We can even block other people from copying
\nthe contents! Acrobat can also be used to create online forms, so
\nthat, for example, employees can file their request for
\nstationery, etc. through their company's intranet.<\/p>\n
There is no doubt about it that the PDF format has become a
\npopular way for distributing heavily formatted documents
\nelectronically. It has extended to cover the growing library of
\nelectronic books (ebooks). Adobe has even released a beta version
\nof Acrobat Reader for Palm devices, so that you can view a PDF
\nfile on your Palm Vx, for example.<\/p>\n
However, to me, many of the new features do not really add
\ntruly compelling capabilities over what we can do without
\nAcrobat. For example, we can still copy and paste text from
\ninside Internet Explorer into an open Word document without
\nhaving to extract the entire page into an RTF file. We can also
\nsave a particular image on a Web page using the Save picture as
\ncommand in the menu that we invoke with the right mouse button,
\nalthough our choice of formats are limited to GIF and BMP only.<\/p>\n
Other new features include the command to rotate the page in
\n90 degree increments, for which I cannot find any real use yet.<\/p>\n
While the Reader is free, the full Acrobat program that we
\nneed to create the PDF file is quite expensive. Adobe seems to
\nrealize this, and now it offers a new service that we can use to
\ncreate PDF files without having to buy Acrobat. For $9.99 per
\nmonth or $99.99 a year, we can send them our source documents-
\neven the URL of a webpage, and Adobe will return them to us in
\nPDF format. We can have them convert an unlimited number of
\nfiles. It's too bad the service is currently only available in
\nthe U.S. and Canada. (zatni@cbn.net.id)<\/p>",
"url": "https:\/\/jawawa.id\/newsitem\/the-acrobatic-way-to-share-your-documents-with-others-1447893297",
"image": ""
},
"sponsor": "Okusi Associates",
"sponsor_url": "https:\/\/okusiassociates.com"
}