Customer Reviews

Acrobat 6 and PDF Solutions

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This book is a thorough presentation on the subject of portable document formats or PDFs. PDFs, independent of platform and application, are a saving grace in the growing complexity of the computer world. Taz Tally's book addresses the variables involved in optimizing PDFs, starting from the creation of the original document all the way to the end product, the PDF. The book explains how to customize each file depending on its use. The author also covers manipulations of Acrobat Distiller and the versatile application Acrobat 6.

The book is well written and repetitive enough so if the reader missed the message on the first round, he or she will catch it again within just a few pages. The summaries, tables, and screen samples are particularly good and support the text. The author's style is as conversational as it gets within a technical book. I enjoyed his exclamations and honesty.

I am always interested in the completeness of the index since I often have the need to solve a specific problem. The sixteen-page index held enough detail to locate a reference in the book rather than having to search from page to page. The table of contents is also complete and easy-to-use.

This Sybex manual is an excellent resource for folks creating forms, presentations, and collaborative publications as well as learning about the more conventional conversion of digital documents to PDFs. This edition comes with a CD of material supporting the text including a demo of Sonar Bookends for automatic hyperlinking (to create a table of contents, an index, and more), FlightCheck, a prepress problem identifier, and a trial version of PitStop for visually checking and editing PDFs.

Dr. Tally is author of Avoiding the Scanning Blues, a guide to desktop scanning, and Electronic Publishing: Avoiding the Output Blues, a book on desktop publishing and Postscript files. Tally is also known for his entertaining seminars and instructional videos on a variety of computer topics.