Java Glossary : Acrobat

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Adobe's free viewer for PDF files. PDF gives much finer control over placement and look of the text and images than you have with HTML. PDF files are much more compact than the equivalent bit map files because they contain PostScript ASCII text which is rendered in the viewer. I discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the PDF vs HTML format under PDF. To create PDF files you will want the following tools:

Adobe Acrobat PDF Tools
Tool	Approx Cost	Purpose
Adobe Acrobat Reader 6.0.1	free	lets you view PDF files. Works standalone or inside a browser.
Adobe Acrobat 6.0		Converts word processing documents, Adobe Illustrator files, graphic images and PostScript files to PDF format. Also lets you edit PDF files and add annotations to them. It lets you convert paper forms to electronic ones in minutes. The tool would make Java programmers drool. You can just as easily convert electronically created form images into live forms to capture data. This tool is so easy to use a non programmer could create a form that web users fill and click to submit to a database, to a CGI server or as email. You can import the emails back into Acrobat to view them nicely formatted. It permits tacking on custom JavaScript code for more advanced applications. Lets you import and export in HTML format.
Adobe Capture Personal 3	$700.00 USD	OCR program that lets you scan documents into PDF format. Very good at seamlessly turning whatever it cannot understand with OCR into an embedded graphic. You can't tell by looking at the final result which parts were done with graphics and which with OCR. In theory you could use any OCR program, such as TextBridge.
Adobe Capture Cluster 3	$7000.00 USD plus	Like Adobe Capture personal, except that it organises the many different people working on the same giant project, some scanning, some touching up, some preparing indexes and links.
Adobe Messenger 3	$1500.00 USD	Sets up an idiot-proof way to scan documents into PDF format that makes it no more difficult than making a Xerox copy or sending a FAX. Does not allow for touchup.
Adobe GoLive 5	$285.00 USD	Once you export your PDF into HTML you can tweak it with GoLive, or any other HTML editor such as Dreamweaver. I have not had a chance to see what the HTML looks like that Acrobat creates. I assume it will be as disgusting as that produced by MS Word. It would take huge amounts of cleanup to convert it to rival directly-generated HTML for comprensibility. However bulky, it should render reasonably faithfully.

The only absolutely essential tool is Adobe Acrobat 5,1. The rest you can live without.

All Adobe software is overpriced and ponderously slow. You need higher end computers no more than a couple of years old to run it satisfactorily. For document composition, you want Windows NT/2000/XP. You want a scanner with a sheet feed. The Acrobat viewer works fine even on older equipment. If you use a flat bed scanner, someone has to sit there feeding it painfully page by page.

I spent a day at an Adobe Acrobat seminar. One thing that made my eyes pop was their Acrobat tool for taking a paper form and converting it to a data-validated electronic form. You could do in about 5 minutes what would take a couple of days coding in Java.

Granted the final form was suited for submission only, not inquiry, and it did not have GridBag flexibility, and was based on a bulky bit map background image, and the validation edits were not as extensive as you could do in Java. They only supported JavaScript stubs. However, boy could you churn those forms out quickly! Even your grandmother could do it.

If there were a tool that could take an Acrobat form and convert it into the equivalent GridBag Java code, you could crank out real code like a madman.

I think we Java programmers ought to have a look at the Acrobat forms creation tool to see what we are aiming for in ease of Java layout programming.

There is now a beta version of the Acrobat Reader written in Java that will run on any platform that supports Java.

For a low-cost alternative, $50.00 USD , to Acrobat, you can use Zenon's Docucom PDF Creator. It is a special print driver that converts anything you print in Windows to a PDF file.

Adobe ¤ EPS ¤ PDF ¤ PDFzone.com ¤ planetpdf.com ¤ PostScript

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