manual into a web-ready PDF.
some important tips for rendering short
marketing collateral as PDFs, including keeping the file size small, linking links, retaining
the integrity of text, and more. All of these practices still apply. However, product documentation can be lengthy, and in order to keep file sizes manageable, apply these additional practices:
Squeeze the compression just a little more: In Chapter 8 we advocated using the
preset [Smallest File Size] when rendering a PDF. If a document contains a lot of
images, consider reducing the pixels per inchvariables even further—72 for color
images and 200 for monochrome images.
Build a table of contents: Acrobat enables users to craft a table of contents using
the Bookmarksfeature, which produces a list of page links in the left column so
that the audience can easily jump around the document without manually scrolling
through every page linearly. Some programs, such as Microsoft Word, automatically generate this list when rendering a PDF when the content is marked up with
appropriate headers.
At the time of this writing, the Web 2.0 fad/buzzword is
sweeping the Internet like a virulent
mist, clinging to and infecting hundreds of marketing
roadmaps, software specs, and business plans
as forward-thinking companies try to grab onto
the next wave. At the center of
these new marketing channels is user-generated
content—fan blogs, social networks, content
syndication, API mash-ups, and more. It’s a great
set of ideas, except that it’s largely
been done before with simple, pedestrian forums.
Aforum can be a massive asset to a company’s support effort. By acknowledging that their
customers have a voice—and that many of them are just as smart as their own employees—
companies can be confident that their forums will grow into sprawling repositories of
information. If traditional knowledgebases are bonsai trees, carefully pruned and tended
by the corporation, forums are creeping ivy, expanding organically in all directions at once,
fertilized by the constant tides of member activity.