Grex Graphics Conference

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Grex Graphics Item 13: Adobe Acrobat and .pdf files
Entered by rcurl on Tue Jul 25 17:26:52 UTC 2000:

For discussion of Adobe Acrobat and .pdf files - wwell, they are sort of
"graphics"...

6 responses total.

#1 of 6 by rcurl on Tue Jul 25 17:35:21 2000:

I wasn't sure where to enter this - there isn't a *software* conference,
and .pdf falls somewhere between web and graphics and ???. Anyway...

I've thught that .pdf was a nice document format when reading them over
the web, but had never created one. So, I picked up a copy of 3.0.1,
learned it worked with .ps (Postscript) files, so just used it for the
first time. I had thought it might be complicated, but Distiller just
crunched up the .ps file, and spat out a .pdf. Easy as pie. And .pdf is
already a web format, making life even easier. 

But what I want to know now is, how does it take a 1.8 MB .ps file and
produce a 186 KB .pdf file? Is anything lost in the process?  Is it
reversible? Are there any neat tricks for using .pdf files on the web?

#2 of 6 by rcurl on Mon Jul 31 16:11:21 2000:

From looking at the online manual I learned that it is possible to add
links and bookmarks to and from .pdf documents. However after reading a
lot of AA .pdf documents I don't recall seeing any such in use. Are there
any problems (or tricks) in using this feature?

(Or am I asking all this in the wrong cf? There have been no responses
to #0.)

#3 of 6 by rcurl on Fri Aug 4 19:02:04 2000:

(Maybe I'll get lucky and someone that knows something about Acrobat will show
up?)

MS Publisher documents can be saved in postscript (.ps) format. Can
WORD documents? It does not appear as an option in the MS WORD 98 (Mac)
Save As dialog. Acrobat Distiller only converts .ps files, so how can
I make a .ps file from a WORD document?

#4 of 6 by rcurl on Sat Aug 5 02:01:40 2000:

YIPPEE - figured it out (by doing a Google search and finally finding:

http://www.slac.stanford.edu/grp/techpubs/help/misc/psfilehowto.html

This gives instructions for Mac, PC and Unix platforms - can probably
even do it on Grex. That's handy, as .pdf is compressed to ca. 1/10 of
the source file. 

It is very simple. One simply PRINTS the document to a PSPrinter, chosen
in the Chooser! This gives on options to "print" to either a .ps or a .pdf
*file* (if you have Distiller installed, for the latter).

None of this was in the WORD or MacOS documentation. (So, how does *anyone*
find out?)

#5 of 6 by eprom on Sat May 10 15:46:58 2003:

I bought the educational version of Adobe Acrobat 5.0
Its pretty neat, I comes with both Distiller and Pdfwriter. You can also
import whole websites with all the hyperlinks included.  Just recently I have
been toying with the forms feature which lets you make fill-in-the-blank type
documents.  I've also archived all my old e-mails into pdfs with the password
protect feature.....pretty nifty.

#6 of 6 by eprom on Sun Aug 17 20:25:01 2003:

Adobe Acrobat 6.0 was released last month. From the reviews, it looks pretty
cool. I have version 5, so it probably wouldn't be worth upgrading.

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