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)