The PDF list is a service provided by PDFzone.com | http://www.pdfzone.com __________________________________________________________________
There are indeed not that many people doing high-level presentations based on PDF. The simplest thing is that they create the presentation in their normal layout tool (Framemaker, InDesign, etc.), using more or less elaborate templates, and then create a PDF document out of it.
If you are looking for literature about how things are done, and also see some examples, you definitely should look at the book by Pattie Belle Hastings/Bj�rn Akselsen/Sandee Cohen "Acrobat 5 Masterclass", published by Peachpit Press (ISBN 0-201-74883-5). I don't know if there is an update to Acrobat 6 in the works, however.
IMHO, Acrobat/PDF can be a good base for presentations. Its functionality is smaller than with Director, but the development cost for a presentation are much lower as well.
CD-Autorun (which is primarily an issue for Windows) has been described at various places for Acrobat (Reader) 5, so far, but I am sure that it is possible to get Reader 6 working as autorun as well. Considering that the product is very new, there has not yet been anything published about this issue.
Multimedia contents can be relatively well embedded, using the available tools, as well as doing some programming with Acrobat JavaScript. There have been some interesting new developments concernign Multimedia contents. You might have a closer look at the Acrobat 6 Help for that.
Also a very promising feature are the OCG (Optional Contents Groups), which are also called "Layers", which can be shown or hidden programmatically. However, so far, there are no useful tools available to create such OCGs (or would you consider Visio to be a useful tool for authoring contents???), but it will just be a question of time until the standard contents creation tools get their upgrade. Watch this space...
One of the great advantages of Acrobat/PDF as a platform for presentations is that it is (well, can be made) vector based. This means that the display quality is not depending on the screen dimension you have available. It will also show very good on really high-resolution screens... something other tools may have their problems with...
And the most important advantage of PDF is that you have all the resources needed for your presentation within the document. Besides a PDF viewer (which will in this case most likely mean an Adobe product), the user does not need anything else.
Hope, this can help.
Max Wyss PRODOK Engineering Low Paper workflows, Smart documents, PDF forms CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland
Fax: +41 1 700 20 37 or +1 815 425 6566 e-mail: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.prodok.com
[ Building Bridges for Information ]
______________________
I asked this on the PDF-basics forum but it doesn't appear that many folks use Acrobat for this purpose. Hopefully that's different among the advanced users.
Is Acrobat suitable for this purpose? I have a client, that has used a Director solution previously, but Director can be expensive to produce.
Is Acrobat 6 a good medium for this? The presentation would be included on CD (autorun enabled) probably in kiosk mode. I realize that Acrobat isn't necessarily the content producer, but apparently some folks have been using it for this purpose as one. I do like how Acrobat can accept multimedia content, which is why I'm considering it.
Suggestions, comments appreciated.
--
To change your subscription: http://www.pdfzone.com/discussions/lists-pdf.html
