dacs.doc electric

ADOBE makes a lot of great products for the Web. I'm sure that you've heard of PhotoShop, Illustrator, PageMaker, and maybe even ImageReady. But I believe that one of the greatest products for the Web is really Adobe Acrobat. Before you think I'm crazy and turn the page, give me a minute to explain.

Sure, PhotoShop is one of the greatest image-editing programs ever created. However, it's not the only one, and it wasn't even the first. Acrobat, although it's not a new program, has helped change the way we share documents between different types of computers, secure documents, and now it's a leading contender for electronic books.

At first, I thought Acrobat would be the last platform I would use for reading electronic books. I started working with Acrobat early on. The files it created were huge, and computer screens were small and dark. Now I recently realized that I've used Acrobat to read a few short books, some manuals, and just downloaded a 197-page book by Seth Godin, Unleashing the IdeaVirus. I have started reading it, and believe it or not I intend to finish it on my Powerbook G3. Acrobat is that good a document reader.

Reading a book in the free Acrobat Reader is easy. Most documents have a table of contents so you can easily navigate your way through them. You can zoom in and out quickly, flip pages using the scroll bars or arrow keys, and even search for text in your document. You can annotate the document, or set bookmarks - great for legal documents or manuals. Acrobat is superior to HTML, because HTML is low-resolution and has limited formatting, and printer formatting in a Web browser is very limited.

If you haven't used Acrobat before, go online to www.dacs.org and download the PDF version of the DACS.doc. It's almost exactly the same as the print version, but saves trees. One month I didn't get my dacs.doc (gasp!), but I went online and downloaded it. You can easily view it or print it from the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Best of all, it will look the same on your Windows or Macintosh computers. In case you haven't downloaded it yet, you can get the free reader online at http://www.adobe.com.

Acrobat is great because it works. You can take virtually any document and print it as you normally would, just selecting the "Adobe PDFWriter" printer driver. It will then create a file that looks almost exactly like what would normally come out of your printer. You can then e-mail this to your friends or co-workers, put it on your Website (like our dacs.doc), or print it later on any printer.

All great reviews reveal the things that'll drive you crazy after you rush out and buy the product after reading what we write. In this case I do have a valid complaint, a very small one. We used Acrobat Distiller to create a PDF file of a standard contract we use so the people who were signing it couldn't change it. Anyway, we tried it several times, but it kept hanging. It turns out that it's not Adobe's fault - a PostScript image in the Word document was bad (it's always easy to blame Microsoft for everything). We simply took the image out and it worked great.

Another great feature of Acrobat is the ability to create forms. These forms can be used to enter data, and it will automatically be saved after the user finishes. You can use these on your computer or even put it up on a Web page to collect information. I haven't tried this feature yet, but I already have some ideas for using it on one of my Websites.

I hope you're starting to understand why I believe Acrobat is a great product. Don't take my word for it, visit Adobe.com and try it yourself.