Electronic Publishing Guide

Many organisations are now waking up to the fact that their documentation ought to be digitised. After all, why not issue big catalogues and technical manuals on CD-ROM, rather than paper? Why not put the company training manual on an Intranet? And why produce service manuals which can't be updated without a complete re-print? After all, even my local gas fitter loads his spare parts prices over a mobile into his laptop each morning.

This guide to electronic publishing from the technical staff at Adobe is an introduction to some of the key issues - format, accessibility, text, graphics, colour, and distribution. Actually, it makes the assumption that most users contemplating this move will start from a position of converting their existing paper-based document. For this reason, it limits the options to a choice between the universal HTML and PDF formats.


The approach is a brief and clear explanation of the choices available within these two formats, plus a recognition of their advantages and disadvantages. There are limits to your control of the appearance of HTML on somebody's screen, but the format is not platform specific, and the files are small [since they're only .TXT files in disguise].

Adobe's PDF files on the other hand are much bigger, but you can retain fine control over fonts and page layout so that the results look similar to a print publication on screen. There's an attempt to persuade us that HTML and PDF can comfortably co-exist, but when it comes to showing successful examples, theirs are all pointing in the direction of Adobe Systems.

The guide covers tricky issues such as font substitution and embedding; the complex matter of compression is described in fairly straightforward language; and there is good advice on designing with the monitor screen in mind.

It's quite a lavish production - thick, glossy pages, and every topic quite well illustrated. However, it doesn't go into much detail. This is a book for people who want to make reasonably well-informed decisions about which route to take in electronic publishing. Following that, you would need something with more technical depth.