As much as I love the web, I know that some things about it, well…as Butthead might tell you..suck. (I can say that thanks to the new U.S. District Court decision on the CDA!) The web is extremely good for information dissemination. If you have a list of facts or figures that you need to distribute, there really is nothing to stop you from throwing that info out onto the web for all to see.
But if you create your own newsletter, catalog, or album of pictures, the web really isn’t a great place to put it. Why? Because it is real hard to make sure that your web pages look anything like what you started from. Think about it. If you have a grammar school newspaper or a corporate catalog, you might use Word Perfect or Microsoft Word to set the type. You can make your headlines in Bold and your bylines in Italics. You can change the fonts and place pictures in the appropriate spots. If you use a
program like PageMaker or PowerPoint, you have even more control over your layout. You can throw in all sorts of fancy pictures and typesets. But unless you learn scads of HTML coding, let’s face it, if you put that newspaper on the web, it will look boring, maybe even just plain bad. HTML gives you some control over font size and now font color. It lets you go Bold or Italic, and it gives you some layout control, but it just doesn’t do enough for you.
So the people that are already creating their own web-independent content, like a newsletter or a catalog, have to recreate it so that it looks good on the web. And that really…sucks. First of all, it’s costly. You have to pay someone to recreate work that has already been done. Or you decide to do it yourself and either buy a book that doesn’t help or a costly program that does an okay job. Secondly, after you put it up on the web, those beautiful graphics that you slaved over in Photoshop may not look right, and they’ll probably slow the page down so badly that everyone bails out before they get around to seeing your work. Lastly, it’s just frustrating. Why can’t the job just be done right and done once?
That’s why many sites are using PDF by Adobe to publish their catalogs or newsletters on the web. PDF stands for Portable Document Format. PDF does this:
It lets you publish web documents using the programs that you already know how to use. And the resulting docs look the same on your computer as they do on any other, regardless of operating system. Annoying techies would call it “platform independent”. So if you take a nicely laid out newsletter with a full color banner that sits nicely between details of your secretary’s birthday and a picture of the company picnic, the person that grabs your document will see it just as you have intended it. The PDF format also conserves internet bandwidth by letting you grab the whole thing and then look at it off-line, keeping the number of “cars” on the information superhighway down to a minimum. Many companies are putting up documents in this format right now. And all you need to check them out is the Adobe Acrobat Reader from http://www.adobe.com. The present version for Macintosh and PC is code named Acrobat “Amber” and it’s version 3.0.. Like most great web programs like Netscape or Real Audio, Acrobat is free to the public! It’s a shareware program that interprets PDF and displays or “Reads” it for you. It is about 1 M to download and it installs pretty easily. You can even use another program by Adobe called Exchange to add HTML hyperlinks in your finished document…and that definitely doesn’t suck. For a great example of how you can use this to your advantage, just check out Adobe’s site.
Companies like design firms can now put entire portfolios on their sites without fear of how the web might make them appear to prospective customers. Look for any and all brochures from places like tourist destinations, company investment portfolios, mass market catalogs that look like ones you might see in the stores to start to crop up everywhere using the portable doc format. Although at first glance this might seem to be a call to abandon HTML altogether and go running to embrace PDF, it is not. They are both good at what they do, but they do very different things. If you have a question on which format to use, try to stick with the following: PDF should be used for a document that you want to retain specific creative control over. It has to look the same on your computer or hard copy and anywhere else someone might look at it. HTML should be used when you have a list or information that you want to share, but don’t really care how it looks.
Put both of these great ideas together and you will definitely see how closely PDF and HTML can work alongside each other to make what you wanted to say to the world look exactly like you wanted it to look.
…And that’s pretty cool, Beavis.
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