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Adobe Acrobat

Adobe® Acrobat® PDF (portable document format) is a very popular tool for electronic document publication, widely used as an alternative to distributing printed manuals, user guides and many other types of document. Acrobat files are compact, making it practical to store and distribute even very large documents on CD ROM and via the internet and company intranets at a fraction of the costs involved in publishing paper documents.

Any user guide or manual that we produce can be provided in PDF format, bringing substantial savings in:

cost of publication and distribution.
cost of implementing changes and updates.
time to deliver new or updated documents.

We can also convert your existing documents to PDF, either by converting source files or, if these are not available, by scanning hard-copy documents.

PDF document pages can be viewed on screen directly from CD ROM or the internet/intranet and appear exactly as in the original document, including headers, footers and other page formatting. If users want a hard copy, they can print selected pages or the whole document as required on their normal office printer. Although all PDF documents can be read on screen and printed, they can also be optimised for one or the other. When we create PDF documents we apply the appropriate graphics resolutions, page formats and other considerations, depending on how you anticipate them being used.

The Acrobat Reader software required to view and print Acrobat PDF documents is available for free download from the Adobe website (http://www.adobe.com/), and can be distributed royalty-free together with your documents. Reader is available for all major platforms including Windows, MacOS, OS/2, Linux, Unix, etc., and PDF documents can be read identically on any platform, regardless of their origin. Acrobat Reader also integrates with most browsers including Internet Explorer and Netscape, enabling PDF documents to be accessed directly from the web via your browser.

Acrobat documents are not simply static copies of their paper counterparts. It is possible to incorporate many of the features associated with online help such as:

hypertext linking within a document, and to other documents, applications and websites.
word and string search facilities.
graphical navigation tools.

If you currently distribute documentation in hard-copy, or are anticipating doing so, it might well be worth discussing the potential of PDF documentation with us.

PDA made a good first impression by visiting our factory within 2 hours of our request for urgent assistance, and by demonstrating an obvious ability to understand our equipment. They had no problems liaising with our in-house author or working to established documentation standards even providing some useful suggestions for improvement.

Once the project was agreed, they just got on with the job, proving very willing to get thoroughly involved with the equipment, and competent to carry out dismantling, reassembly and set-up procedures. As well as writing the technical manual, they also actively contributed to the process of devising maintenance and fault-location procedures for what was a very new machine. We were extremely pleased by the service provided by PDA and would not hesitate to use them again should the need arise.

Tony Couling, Graham Labelling Systems

REDBOX DESIGN