A surprising number of number of people seem to have deleted my message(s)
about Adobe Acrobat and then repented at leisure, so I am boring the rest of
you by reposting the only bit I have myself which are the parts copied from
the Acrobat Sampler CD.
Since librarians are going to be the big winners in understanding this
technology, I urge you again to get hold of the CD Sampler (which includes
Acrobat Reader). It is far less painful than downloading it from anywhere
else and contains over 150 Meg of examples including the Old and New
Testament and the complete works of Shakespeare. It all makes great holiday
browsing and its faster than the Web. The more people understand the
technology as consumers the more authors will be encouraged to deliver
material this way. Incidentally, the Evening Standard weighs in at about
5.5Meg.
Example 1
EVENING STANDARD
Sample edition (18th January, 1994) from Associated Newspapers in Adobe
Acrobat Portable Document Format
Published in London, the Evening Standard is one of three newspapers
published by Associated Newspapers - the other two being: The Daily Mail and
The Mail on Sunday.
Associated Newspapers has been working with Adobe's Acrobat technology for
some time now as part of their electronic publishing strategy.
In conjunction with Adobe, the publisher has completed a very successful
test. Each day as soon as the Evening Standard is published, the electronic
publishing group converts the newspaper into Acrobat Portable Document Format
(PDF), and transmits it from London to Adobe's Corporate Headquarters in
Mountain View, California via ISDN. It is available on Adobe's Acrobat server
for all employees to view and print, as desired. The average transmission
time is less than 10 minutes.
Building on this strategy, Associated Newspapers is now planning to produce a
CD-ROM every month, containing back-copies of the Evening Standard, The Daily
Mail and The Mail on Sunday in Acrobat PDF format. This CD-ROM will be
commercially available as well as being made available to libraries and
Government bodies.
Lord Rothermere, the Chairman of Associated Newspapers lives in Paris, and
now, rather than having to wait several hours for his copy of each newspaper
edition to arrive by plane, the paper is delivered to him almost immediately,
electronically, in Acrobat PDF format.
Associated Newspapers is also planning to deliver their papers electronically
to other news organisations (including television stations), using Acrobat.
Associated Newspapers has developed a software-based artwork delivery system,
called ADS, which significantly improves the efficiency of delivering
advertising artwork to publishers. It is an industry standard in Europe. All
the manuals for this product are available in Acrobat PDF format.
Internally, Associated Newspapers is expanding their use of Acrobat to share
information electronically, faster and more effectively than ever before.
Example 2
The Figaro's Concorde Project
This operation involves a national newspaper, a national airlines,
communications, several Macs, a Sun and a PC. The "Figaro" is the largest
French national newspaper. The pages are laid out on one of their Macintosh
Quadras using Quark Xpress and the PostScript files are generated and stored
on one of their Sun servers.
After testing Acrobat, the Figaro's Information Systems people got the idea
of the "Concorde Project". The purpose of this project is to allow the
passengers on Air France's New York to Paris flight on the Concorde
supersonic plane to read the lasted issue of the Figaro as they break through
the sound barrier.
..
This is how it's done :
1) As mentioned above, the PostScript files for each page are saved on a Sun
server.
2) A Macintosh station opens the PostScript file on the Sun server and
distills it.
3) The resulting PDF file is stored in a transfer folder.
4) This PDF file is transferred by modem to a PC in the JFK Airport office of
Air France.
5) Air France opens the PDF file with Acrobat Exchange for Windows and prints
it out on a 600 dpi PostScript laser printer in a A3 format.
6) The issue is distributed to passengers boarding the Concorde leaving for
Paris.
The creation of a PDF version of the newspaper does not require extra work
because the newspaper already has the PostScript files on hand and the
distillation will soon be triggered automatically. The Figaro likes the PDF
file format because it travels unaffected from one platform to another and
because the small file size saves time and money when transferring the
newspaper by modem.
The following story was copied from a newspaper article formatted exactly as
it appeared in the Evening Standard but obviously loosing a lot in this
transmission. Beats faxing:
Typist wins record payout in RSI case
AN INLAND Revenue office worker today collected record compensation of almost
L80,000 after being forced to give up her job through repetitive strain
injury , writes Tony Maguire. The case of the woman - who worked as a typist
in West London - sets an important legal precedent only three months after a
High Court judge dismissed RSI as "meaningless". Clive Brooke, general
sec-retary of the Inland Revenue Staff Federation, said his union was
pursuing more than 150 other cases. The Inland Revenue agreed to an
out-of-court set-tlement following joint research with the federation over
the impact of RSI. Picture: GLENN COPUS
Greetings from Oz!
Richard_M._Ure@aapda.com.au
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