Seminars for Technical Writers

Paperless PDFs

Enhance your market value by designing documents your customers will love.

In this full-day presentation, learn how to use Adobe Acrobat to design screen-friendly and user-friendly electronic documentation.

Produce electronic manuals that are dynamic and interactive by using embedded video, Flash, and hyperlinks. Develop screen-friendly documents by choosing the right fonts, colors, and page layout.

Syllabus

  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

Presentation Files