Barrie McElroy
These jottings chronicle some of the lessons learned recently about publishing with Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). These notes are intended to encourage RISC OS users to try PDF as a means of easy, high quality publishing. I'll give some reasons for choosing PDF, comment on the processes chosen and explain some of the problems encountered and their resolution.
Quality publishing, value and control
Over the past three years, I have edited and desktop published booklets for Geography Action Week. These were commissioned and distributed by the Australian Geography Teachers Association for teachers and students in all Australian secondary schools.
Getting a high quality paper product in 1997 and 1998 proved difficult. Costs were kept low by using ordinary print shops for the black and white publications. None knew of RISC OS/Acorn of course. Some of these were happy to take the manuscript in Microsoft Word format, but this had several drawbacks, the major one being that I am used to the freedom and power of frame-based publishing using Ovation Pro and hate the limitations of Word. Apart from this, Word seems not to hold its formatting consistently from computer to computer. When some folk in print shops begin to correct format and pagination they seem to become instant experts in editing and layout and set about altering things.
Few wanted to talk about the use of PostScript, and I knew some of the potential complexities of this method, especially as I was in Adelaide and the print shop was in Melbourne. I was pleased that none would touch Microsoft Publisher for other than four-page pamphlets as they tell me it doesn't hold its registration properly. So, in 1997 and 1998, I provided the best hard copy possible and the resultant quality from offset printing was quite good. The product from Ovation Pro was highly regarded as most such publications in Australia come from Word rather than Quark Express.
In 1999, I was determined to do better. First I had to convince the project sponsors and manager of the virtues of PDF publishing. The print shop chosen was experienced with the format and produced a very high quality product on glossy paper. This print quality helped 'Are You Ready?', a 44-page publication, win the biennial AGTA Award 2000 for publishing for a 'Geography reference book for teachers' against competition from major, commercial publishers. http://www.ozemail.com.au/~bmcelroy/gaw/gaw99.html
Print friendly web publishing
Arguments that helped convince the sponsors to allow me to use PDF for producing the booklet were:
it's the only truly portable, universal format that is accessible to all.
it remains relatively tamper proof and always maintains layout.
it could be cheaply distributed to schools in electronic format for them to print extra, identical copies.
it could be published on the web in identical form with very little effort compared to an HTML version.
Some of this rationale was thwarted because the sponsors neglected to get electronic publishing permission for all of the material!
Some of the applications used to create PDF files.
Drop a PostScript file from PoScript2 or Linotype onto RiScript.
Alternatively, if !GhostScr has been 'seen', drop the file onto ps2pdf.
The PDF publishing process
I am an amateur in this field and acknowledge the great help provided by the generous professionals who inhabit some RISC OS mail list realms such as Archive-On-Line and OvationPro. Please recognise that these notes are from a novice, experiment and seek professional advice where needed.
The production of the Ovation Pro file with the support of many RISC OS applications is a story in itself. The generation of the PDF file for the print shop required two simple steps: (1) printing a PostScript file and (2) distilling it to PDF. With the printer drivers supplied with RISC OS computers, and either GhostScript and ps2pdf or RiScript, the job is straightforward. I may put some extra detail on my website later.
PostScript printing
There are two generic Printer Definition Files (the other 'PDF'!) for this, namely PoScript and PoScript2. As my project was for a high quality black and white product, I used a third driver which prepares output for a Linotype imagesetter, specifically the Linotronic 200. The file is called 200 and is found in the Linotype folder of the collection of Printers. It only has the basic fonts and is monochrome, but it produces 1270dpi as against 300dpi for the generic PoScript drivers. I used PoScript2 with the colour flag ticked to get a PostScript file for the web pages where definition isn't so critical and so I could include colour versions of some figures.
While I haven't tried it, the Linotype driver should be able to be used for each of the colour separations for a high quality colour job.
Distilling PDF
I tried two distillers, GhostScript on RISC OS and Adobe Acrobat Distiller (version 3) under Windows. Since then, Cerilica have released, for RISC OS, a very good new version of RiScript, RISCOS Ltd launched a free, very useful, early version of Taborca, while, for Windows, Acrobat Distiller version 4 and version 1.5 of PDFCreator have become available.
GhostScript is free and does a splendid job for most purposes. Drawbacks I encountered include:
poor display of the frames, some lines and images from my Ovation Pro document when viewed with !pdf (see below). Apart from raster images, including JPEGs, they usually display well on other readers. !pdf reads JPEGs well from other distillers.
no ability to embed hyperlinks, including internet links for web publishing.
poor compression leading to large files (presumably the LZW licence is too costly for a free application).
Some aspects of PDF files from GhostScript seem not to display well with !pdf
The last issue wasn't very important as I had to deliver the file on a Zip disc (100Mb). I couldn't ignore the first to the detriment of RISC OS users, if any, in Australian schools. To be fair to GhostScript and !pdf, I have replicated this problem while fiddling with fonts in Acrobat Exchange.
The three drawbacks mentioned for GhostScript made me choose Acrobat. Even now that I have the splendid RiScript, I use Acrobat for electronic publishing to access bookmarks, internet links and annotations (see below). I do hope that we all support Cerilica to enable them to implement these vital features in RiScript soon. It is great for supervisor and student to be able to pass thesis chapters back and forth using the 'sticky yellow notes' of PDF.
Annotations in the form of 'sticky yellow notes' can be added in Acrobat.
Fonts
The basic fonts (Type 1 Adobe PostScript) available in most PDF distillers are: Times (Trinity under RISC OS), Helvetica (Homerton), Courier (Corpus), Symbol (Sidney), and Zapf Dingbats (Selwyn). For the most part, it pays to stay with these when learning to use PDF.
Keep this in mind when preparing PostScript files, as fonts not available as Type 1 or 2 will be substituted or converted to Type 3 profiles which take a lot more space and may display like chunky bitmaps on screen (see the author's name in the screenshot above). However, they usually print to hard copy exactly as intended. As one learns the tricks of the trade, some other fonts can be incorporated. RiScript makes this easy although it can be achieved with GhostScript.
Size is important
For web publishing, file size is very significant. The table below gives some interesting information about my file's progress to PDF by various paths. It shows some trends, but each job is different. GhostScript can give smaller files than Acrobat. The main tips for keeping files small are:
use only, or mainly, the basic Type 1 fonts.
avoid big images (e.g. 16 rather than 16 million colours!)
swallow pride and use Acrobat to get extra compression when it is essential.
PDF file sizes from various production combinations
A troublesome issue
Figures caused some problems, especially with the GhostScript and !pdf combination. Some raster images displayed badly on screen and, at least on my HP LaserJet, printed streaky hard copies. I eventually used either drawfiles or JPEGs. I assume that vector files work well as PostScript and the distilled PDF use a vector language to describe pages. My advice is to avoid sprites, or at least test them thoroughly. JPEGs appear to be held, displayed and printed in JPEG format rather than being converted within the PDF file.
Help available
The community of PostScript and PDF users is helpful. Find links to valuable articles on the web via sites like Adobe and PDFZone. These and other links will eventually be found on my RISC OS pages.
Horses for courses
For a largely text publishing job, GhostScript does a fine job. Recently, I've been helping a local school bookseller (formerly also an Acorn Education Centre) to put its wares on the web. They wanted it all in HTML, but as all of their lists are Impression files, I have set up their RiscPC with GhostScript, !ps2pdf and !pdf. They can now get all the lists on the web very quickly and easily. When the orders come back by facsimile or post, the forms will be identical to the originals. All of this costs next to nothing!
For those who need better quality, especially of Type 3 fonts, RiScript is a must and good value.
For fully featured electronic publishing, I use Acrobat. If file size is critical, Acrobat may be the answer. Apparently, PDFCreator doesn't yet have all of the features, but in some ways, for example font handling, it is claimed to be better than Acrobat.
Try a variety of approaches and choose the one that suits the job. Always test the product on the common readers and keep the file size suitable.
I'll post a temporary page with links to examples and support at http://www.ozemail.com.au/~bmcelroy/ro.html.
Happy PDF publishing.