The 'acrobatic' way to share your documents with others

The 'acrobatic' way to share your documents with others

By Zatni Arbi

JAKARTA (JP): A colleague, Bayu, recently sent me a short e-
mail. "I want to send you an invitation, but I want to make sure
it will be OK as the file size is 350 KB."

I was extremely appreciative, as what he did was the most
appropriate thing. Before sending over a large file to me, he
asked me first whether it would not cause me any problem.

I replied that there would be no problem as the size of his
file was only 350 KB. Besides, I had a 24-hour connection to the
Internet through KabelVision and I had set my Outlook Express to
download e-mail messages automatically every three minutes.

Within one hour, I received his very attractive wedding
invitation -- in a sleek, self-running PowerPoint presentation.

Contrast what he did with some others who simply dump half a
dozen high-resolution picture files up to 900 KB each into my
mailbox without notifying me beforehand. Not surprisingly, if my
PC happens to be turned off at that time I will end up with a
clogged e-mail system, since my mailbox quota at pop.cbn.net.id
is only 5 MB.

The real problem with a clogged mailbox is that, each time the
quota is exceeded, the next e-mail message that comes knocking at
my CBN account will be rejected and bounce back to its sender. As
I rely so much on e-mail for my work, you would not be surprised
to see me more than just frowning when that happens.

What makes it even worse is that, almost every time, I had no
real use of the huge image files that come with those press
releases!

If you share long documents with a lot of graphics and images
with other people over the Internet, you can do at least two
things in their favor.

First, let each of the recipients know first that you are
about to send him one or more large files. They may have to
download these files one at a time to avoid clogging, and this is
even more crucial if they have a slow dialup connection to the
Internet.

Second, you can use the popular WinZip or PKZip utilities to
compress the file so that the size is reduced before you send it
over the Internet.

But, what would you do if you want to share a neatly formatted
document with other people and you want it to look to them
exactly how it looks to you?

If you use the standard Word format, problems may emerge if
you happen to use fonts that are not available on the other
people's systems. This can cause changes in the document layout
and formatting, and they will not be able to see the result of
your hours of efforts in trying to make it look so professionally
designed.

Solution

One solution, which has increasingly become the standard, is
to use Acrobat from Adobe Corporation. With Acrobat, all the
fonts, layout and other formatting aspects of the document will
remain relatively intact despite the differences in hardware and
software that we may use.

One thing that should be noted here is that a document created
with Acrobat may be larger than the original, because it contains
the fonts, etc. In my experiment, for example, a 26 KB file
created in Microsoft Word became a 69 KB after conversion into an
Acrobat file.

It must have happened to you: Someone sent you a file with
the .PDF extension following the filename, and when you clicked
on the file name it would come out in Acrobat Reader. PDF stands
for Portable Document Format. This format, created by Adobe, was
meant to enable us to share documents from a broad range of
sources (Web, Microsoft Office, etc.).

To be able to open and view the file, your recipients are not
required to have the same program as you do. For example, if you
create your document in Excel, they do not have to have Excel in
their computer. All they need is a free utility called Acrobat
Reader. We can download this utility from a lot of download
sites, including Adobe's own website (www.adobe.com). Acrobat
Reader can be plugged in into your Web browser, such as the
Internet Explorer.

However, creating a PDF file -- which is how an Acrobat file
is popularly called -- requires the full version of Acrobat
(US$249). In fact, Adobe has just released a new version of the
program, Version 5.0.

During the installation, two buttons are added on a new
toolbar in Word, Excel and PowerPoint if you have Microsoft
Office on your system. To create a PDF file from an Office
document, all we need to do is click on the Convert to Adobe PDF
button. The other button will do the same thing plus create a
blank e-mail form with the PDF attached so that you can send it
out right away.

Features

New in Acrobat 5.0 is the feature that extracts an RTF (Rich
Text File) file from a website, as you can see in the
accompanying picture.

What I did was open The Jakarta Post webpage in Acrobat 5.0,
and my PC automatically accessed the Internet to download the
page. The page was displayed perfectly as if I was using Internet
Explorer (pictured at left). All the links were live and I could
click on any of them. The linked page would be displayed, and I
could choose to have it displayed in Acrobat or in a Web browser
such as Internet Explorer or Netscape.

Acrobat 5.0 can also extract all the images in a PDF file or a
Web page and save them in TIFF, JPEG or PNG file format. Too bad
we do not have any control of which image to extract, as Acrobat
will simply extract all the images and save them on the hard
disk.

Also new in Acrobat 5.0 is the facility to add comments and
read comments attached by others to a document. We can even do
this online, making Acrobat 5.0 a suitable environment for
collaboration.

Its document security feature has also been improved. We can
prevent the document from being printed out or changed by
unauthorized people. We can even block other people from copying
the contents! Acrobat can also be used to create online forms, so
that, for example, employees can file their request for
stationery, etc. through their company's intranet.

There is no doubt about it that the PDF format has become a
popular way for distributing heavily formatted documents
electronically. It has extended to cover the growing library of
electronic books (ebooks). Adobe has even released a beta version
of Acrobat Reader for Palm devices, so that you can view a PDF
file on your Palm Vx, for example.

However, to me, many of the new features do not really add
truly compelling capabilities over what we can do without
Acrobat. For example, we can still copy and paste text from
inside Internet Explorer into an open Word document without
having to extract the entire page into an RTF file. We can also
save a particular image on a Web page using the Save picture as
command in the menu that we invoke with the right mouse button,
although our choice of formats are limited to GIF and BMP only.

Other new features include the command to rotate the page in
90 degree increments, for which I cannot find any real use yet.

While the Reader is free, the full Acrobat program that we
need to create the PDF file is quite expensive. Adobe seems to
realize this, and now it offers a new service that we can use to
create PDF files without having to buy Acrobat. For $9.99 per
month or $99.99 a year, we can send them our source documents-
even the URL of a webpage, and Adobe will return them to us in
PDF format. We can have them convert an unlimited number of
files. It's too bad the service is currently only available in
the U.S. and Canada. (zatni@cbn.net.id)