As a relatively inexperienced user of Acrobat (now v4 on a Windoze PII 266) I am nevertheless a devoted fan of this amazimg juggler.
I have recently completed a 100 page+ technical handbook project which was originally presented to me in a classic "this is all we've got" form by the client.
Almost 200 Powerpoint files of dubious layout origins needed to be merged with about 40 pages or so of other text and diagrams. Quite frankly, without Acrobat I would probably still be wading through reworking the whole thing. I decided to use Pagemaker (6.5) as my document format as this would then allow me to manipulate page order etc to meet future ammendment needs. The approach turned out to be:

1. created .pdf file from Powerpoint presentation hand outs (3 per page)
2. exported .pdf file to .eps and created individual .eps images of each .pdf page (handled by Acrobat automatically)
3. placed images in new PM65 document - able to crop and locate images at will for page ordering
4. inserted extra pages as needed and moved order around etc
5 finally distilled PM65 file to creat new .pdf as final deliverable to printer whilst keepng PM65 file as master for subsequent re-use/modification.

The routine worked well without any problems (except the old 'soditi'vedonethatbitwrongagain' errors).

The real bonus came right at the end when an 100+ meg. PM file was miraculously reduced to an around 900 kilobytes .pdf file by Acrobat Distiller,
a nice size for transmission by email to the printer. After sussing out a problem related to me using Acrobat 4 and the printers Acrobat 3 not liking some font info (thought this was my fault again but persuaded printer to upgrade to v4 which solved problem)
the final job run was excellent.
I am more amazed by Acrobat every time I use it and Acrobat 4's option to select final use as a quality parameter is great (I used 'for printing'). I don't know how they do it but even several 3-4meg b&w tiff images got compressed down into that final 900Kb which can fit on a single floppy and also emailed to client for on screen proofing!

I do agree that v4 files can't be read by v3 reader even when saved for v3 - this is a bit of a bummer and not what I would expect from Adobe!!!
Also, this particular job was greyscale only. But, warts and all, I'm still mightily impressed with what I managed to achieve. More important - the client was too.
I'm also very enthused by some of the new Web related features in v4.

Tony Riley (UK)
ar@arimage.com





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