Re:

Hi, Sharon...welcome aboard...:).

I maintain a good-sized Intranet site for a large corporation, and this is
an ongoing controversy.  Tech writers like PDF, and the professional tools
it provides them.  To me, it seems a bit of a short-sighted approach to lock
everything into a proprietary format.  Given the condition of the browser's
compliance, though, I can't argue with them over the fact that Adobe's
applications provide far more control over the appearance and organization
of their documents...

If you have any influence at all there, my suggestion would be to push for
XML.  This format will allow conversion to HTML, PDF, or any of a number of
other formats.  What this means to your people is that one document can be
available for everyone, and a change in that document can be reflected in
all versions, no matter what the viewer prefers to read it in.  Support is
growing rapidly, and it is definitely possible to realistically use XML in
intranet environments right now.  The hard part is getting the system set
up.

Some additional advantages XML can bring are: Accessibility (this has to be
a concern for you now!), portability (PC, MAC, Unix/Linux, CE, Handlhelds,
etc...), robust durability (although new, it is rapidly being adopted as a
standard for cross-platform document formatting), and ease of maintenance
(that was worth mentioning twice!).  I know (assume)  it would be a step
outside your experience to deal with this, but it might be worth looking
into...

Darrell

----- Original Message -----

Hi List

This is my first time post on this mail list (in fact, any mail list), so
this
is a big moment for me. :)

I manage a relatively large government web site (which is in somewhat of a
shambles, but I'll save that for another day). The growing trend in our
department, is to put anything and everything up on the web as a PDF file.
While this is an easy operation from our end, I'm not sure how happy our
clients (the general public) are about this. I have two questions:

1. What is the optimal size for a single PDF file? We have PDF files on our
site ranging from 100K to 6-7MB. I imagine a lot of our clients would access
these with a modem over a phone line.

2. Is it possible to edit a PDF file? If so, through what application? I
know
how to create PDF files (using Acrobat Distiller), although I'm by no means
an
expert.

Appreciate any hints.

Sharon Elix

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