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One of our major product categories is Lounge Furniture. Currently the costing is in Excel, drawings on paper, product photos in JPEGs and the New Product Release form is a combination of Excel/Word & JPEG’s.
The size of some of these files is such that branches find they are slow too open/print.
We are experimenting with Adobe pdf, and fine that an entire workbook converts OK, and has an acceptable file size, we are now tesing how we can incorporate graphics.
Does anybody know of a Document package that allows us to compile a “book” for a unit specification that has a slim file format, can limit some users to only viewing/printing. A drawing interface would be ideal, as we could then update the drawings in real time.

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Paul, a couple of things. Firstly graphics can easily be incorporated into PDF files and the resulting file size is still relatively small. There are a number of electronic books around, many of which are based on html scripts. What you could do is build web pages using a wysiwyg editor if necesszary. The resulting files will be small and can incorporate graphics. A drawing interface could be added although how is beyond my current capability!.

Hope that helps

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Mike, I know very little about PDF or HTML, so can you tell me, can an HTML document be distributed as securely as a PDF can? I know that PDF can be encrypted so that the only way to get at the content is use a scanner, but don’t know if this is true of HTML. I ask because our company is reviewing options for publishing customer data on a secure area of our website. (I don’t want to break PDF security for nefarious purposes, I frequently get Requests for Proposal in PDF, and want to get data from them into Excel for pricing analysis.)

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No I don’t believe it can be as secure as PDF. I am not aware of protecting an html document so that the contents can’t be changed. That is one area where PDF are much stronger.

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OK, that’s a good suggestion to look at. We will continue with the pdf trials but now I have a fallback.

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Acrobat allows you to add/insert/delete individual pages quite easily. We use it to create technical documents in Word, then add drawings ‘printed’ from CAD software that we can’t otherwise integrate with Word.

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Thanks for that information, looks like we are heading down the right path by combining all current data into a pdf.

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You might take a look at PaperPort by ScanSoft (http://www.scansoft.com). I’ve used for several years and really like it. You can scan into it or “print” to it from other applications. You then stack each page from different sources into one file. Users can install a free viewer utility to view/print files. This may all seem more confusing than it is, but it might be worth a look.

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Thanks you for this, I will have a look at this site.

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