"Paperless PDFs" Syllabus
At left is the full course outline for the Paperless PDFs seminar.
The seminar is revised and updated regularly, and can be geared to meet your particular requirements and interests.
1. Designing PDFs for the Screen
- Designing for the screen means thinking about how your customers actually use PDF files -- do you expect the customer to view online or print?
- What is "screen-friendly?"
2. PDFs and Usability
- The criticisms of PDF for online reading and browsing.
- Discussion about Jakob Nielsen: "Forcing users to browse PDF documents makes your website's usability about 300% worse relative to HTML pages."
- Discussion about resolving these issues.
3. PDFs and Design Issues
- Page size and layout.
- Font choices.
- Colour choices.
- Navigation styles.
- Designing for colour-blindness and for B&W printout.
4. Adobe Acrobat Workflow
- Producing PDFs reliably, step by step.
5. Acrobat Dos and Don'ts
- PDF Writer.
- "Save as PDF" command.
- Windows and Mac OS.
6. Acrobat and Fonts
- TrueType versus PostScript versus OpenType.
7. Acrobat and Printer Drivers
- Choosing and installing printer drivers for PDF generation.
- All about PPDs.
8. Using Acrobat and Microsoft Word
- Why you should avoid Word for PDF generation, and what to do if you can't.
9. Workshops
- Conversion of an existing 8.5 X 11 document to a screen-friendly format
- Adding interactive navigation elements to documents
- Single sourcing: Switching between printer-friendly and screen-friendly layouts in FrameMaker
- Designing an interactive kiosk application in PDF
- Embedding external hyperlinks
- Embedding dynamic media: Video and Flash