Designing with PDF: Then and now

by Kurt Foss, Editor, AcrobatUsers.com

Nearly 13 years ago, Adobe Systems launched version 1.0 of its Adobe Acrobat software and soon thereafter set out to convince the computer-savvy world that the company had come up with a better idea — in the form of the Portable Document Format (PDF). Promoting Acrobat as the first "practical and effective method of communicating all types of documents across different types of computers," Adobe predicted its technology would hasten a true electronic age of communication. Explaining PDF as a way to preserve "the essential look and feel of even the most complex documents that contain photographs, various typefaces and color," Adobe also announced in its June 1993 news release that the company was already planning future support for advanced features, including document editing and multimedia.

While the early adopters of Acrobat and PDF were in the printing industry, there were some who even in those birthing-pain years began to see the potential for — and a number of challenges with — creating interactive PDF documents. Among those was Chris Converse, who in 1994 produced a 43-page, horizontally oriented "Designing for Acrobat" guide. Working with the Wharton School at the time, Converse developed the guide primarily to share his early Acrobat enlightenment with other designers. Or in his own words from the guide's cover page, "to cover some of the most difficult obstacles which I have encountered in bringing my designs into Adobe Acrobat." Through trial-and-error experimentation, he "found that there are ways to bring my PDF to new heights."

By pure coincidence, Converse is — among other professional responsibilities — currently web designer and webmaster for AcrobatUsers.com. So we asked him to reflect on that early guide and to compare 1993-era Acrobat and PDF with today's versions. To help make the assessment, he's produced a 2006 update of the guide, which we're making available for download.

"When I first started using Acrobat in 1993," he says, "I noticed a difference in the way Acrobat displayed my documents, depending on what types of files, file formats and settings I used in my authoring application. I started to use different settings and file formats when preparing documents that would be viewed in Acrobat (and not likely printed). The way Acrobat displayed graphics prepared for print was different, since Acrobat tried to show you all of the data in the file. Though this is necessary for printing, Acrobat did not re-interpolate — or smooth — graphics for on-screen viewing. In some cases, as shown in the original guide, graphics were difficult to see or understand."

"The big differences I have seen inside of Acrobat have been with its page rendering. The latest two versions have gotten a lot smarter at interpolating high-resolution bitmaps and vector shapes for a low-resolution monitor. In the scanning section of the updated guide, some of the techniques are not as crucial as they were in 1994."

PageMaker was his 1994 authoring tool of choice, Converse says, but most interactive features were added with Acrobat. Not so with the new version.

"Another huge difference for me is that all most of the interactivity in this guide was developed outside of Acrobat," he says. "I actually designed my buttons in Illustrator and applied the actions in Adobe InDesign. By simply exporting to PDF, I had a fully interactive, tagged PDF file. The integration of the Creative Suite around the core technologies of PDF are amazing."

Some obstacles in preparing a document for on-screen use, Converse says, "still include readability of certain fonts, font sizes, page construction, low-resolution monitors and so on. "One thing I think is becoming more challenging is designing your PDF files to be more usable," he says. "There is a section on navigation techniques; however, with full-blown multimedia PDF files making their way into mainstream use, more usability design practices are going to need to be addressed."

"With the ability to embed video into a PDF, and creation tools outside of Acrobat — like setting actions in InDesign — designers can develop for multiple mediums at the same time," Converse says. "And since Acrobat is built on industry standards, making use of technologies such as video and rich media are becoming easier."