I'm in a smallish startup company with no computer standardization yet. Some people have Macs, others have PCs with either XP or Vista.
I have a Vista laptop. Many of the developers who will be reviewing my docs have Macs and their OSX preview won't let them view the new PDFs I'm producing in Flare. (The way they did it before they hired me was to have different people at different times work on the docs in Word and save to PDF.) A couple of them (including one of the co-founders!) doesn't want to install Acrobat Reader on his computer to be able to view the PDF.
HELP!
Is there I way I can tweak my PDF output to make them happy, or do I have to do something completely different and frightening? I have Acrobat 9 Pro, too, if anyone knows how I could use that to help fix this.
Best options are PDF or WebHelp outputs because they're cross-platform. The other options you'd have to set up the Macs to be able to display them, since DotNet Help output needs the .NET platform and Word, well, I'm not sure if Macs can open Word docs as is or if they need to set up an environment to be able to run it on the Mac.
If you absolutely can't get that one guy to install Adobe Reader (and really, what reason could he have to not install it?) then you'd have to go with WebHelp output.
Lisa Eagles may soar, but weasels aren't sucked into jet engines. Warning! Loose nut behind the keyboard.
I don't know what his reasons are for not installing it. Evidently, before I came along and insisted on Flare as my authoring tool, they were using Word and creating their PDFs from that--on the Macs. I think the PDFs they created from their Macs made it possible to view them on the Macs without having Reader installed.
I don't know enough about Macs to know how to solve this--I was hoping there would be some trick (other than moving to a Mac) to tweak it for them. Ha!
I think he'll hate having a zip of WebHelp files even more. And I really don't want to output to Word for doc reviews because that could lead to customers getting Word files instead of secure PDFs.
Thanks for thinking about it though! I'd love to hear any other ideas that may exist.
Acrobat is up to version 9. Flare doesn't directly interact with Acrobat so there's nothing for MadCap to support. What you want to do is submit a feature request asking for more options when generating PDF, specifically the option to save it with compatibility to earlier versions of PDF.
However, if you have a later version of Acrobat yourself, you have an option when reducing the file size of a PDF to make it compatible with earlier versions, including Acrobat 5. So that's a possible workaround for you. Although that seems like a lot of trouble to go through for one guy. If he's not a manager, I say browbeat him into installing the latest version of Reader. And if he is a manager, then ask nicely.
Lisa Eagles may soar, but weasels aren't sucked into jet engines. Warning! Loose nut behind the keyboard.
Oh, yes. It's the backward compatibility that needs to be supported. I did put in a feature request with Tech Support to add the capability to pick which version of PDF to create--just like you can in Acrobat. You can't rely on everyone to download and install the latest Reader.
If you look at properties in a PDF created in Flare, you'll see that it uses PDF version 1.5 (Acrobat 6.x). This version is what Reader uses to know how to open the file--that's why the Mac OS X Preview can't open it--it wants to see PDF version 1.4 (Acrobat 5.x). Even Flare-native PDFs have to follow industry standards.
Alas, I don't have an older version of Acrobat (I would have at my old job!). He is a co-founder, so I'll work with him. The other co-founder can brow beat him for me.
Diana_BB wrote:Alas, I don't have an older version of Acrobat...
Sorry, I meant "later version" as in later version number, or a newer version of the software. I have Acrobat 9 and it allows for saving down to Acrobat 4. I think Acrobat 8 did, too.
Lisa Eagles may soar, but weasels aren't sucked into jet engines. Warning! Loose nut behind the keyboard.
Well, that does make more sense. I have Acrobat Pro 9, so I did use that to save it to the version he wants to use. It would be nice to do as little post-processing in Acrobat as possible, but it's unavoidable at the moment.
I have Acrobat 9 Pro, too, if anyone knows how I could use that to help fix this.
Evidently, before I came along and insisted on Flare as my authoring tool, they were using Word and creating their PDFs from that--on the Macs. I think the PDFs they created from their Macs made it possible to view them on the Macs without having Reader installed.
