Adobe Acrobat Reader
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Adobe Acrobat Reader |
What's this about?Some files on this web site have lines like
That means that the Bylaws document is in Portable Document Format and its size is about 31K, relatively small. You can open the Bylaws document only if you have the Adobe Acrobat Reader, free software available for almost all computer systems How do I install the free software?Go to the page http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html on the web site of Adobe Systems Incorporated. The instructions there will tell you how to download the software. On a Windows 98 machine on April 7, 2003, the steps are those described below. If you're on a different platform they may be slightly different. Adobe may also change the procedures slightly. Check the Adobe site for answers to any questions about installing the reader. They try to make it as straightforward as possible.
If you have questions, please check the Adobe web site. Why do we need to do this?Remember the days before word processors and PC's with word processing software? Would you be willing to go back to the days when there were no special features like multiple fonts to help expose a document's content by using a more complex form than was available on a typewriter? If not, please understand that word processing programs use different formats to represent the different print features: Microsoft Word, for instance, is different even from Microsoft Works, let alone the formats for word processing programs from other companies. HTML, the language of web pages, is a good solution for many purposes, but, it does not handle formatting options (e.g. page breaks) that are fundamental to printed documents. If you are distributing something that you want others to print, and you want to be sure what they get is close to what you intended, either you need to make sure they have the same word processing software that you're using, or you need another solution. One solution that has gained wide acceptance is a format developed by the Adobe
Corporation - it's called "portable document format", or "PDF"
for short. The big win here is that Adobe makes the "reader" part of
the software available for free. Anyone can download software that allows them
to open others' PDF documents. Once downloaded and installed, the Acrobat Reader
connects to the browsers and so when you click a link to a PDF document, the Acrobat
Reader opens automatically to "help" the browser display the document.
Note that PDF documents often take longer to "load" than most HTML documents,
so if a link is marked ( There are other possible solutions. For example, Microsoft has a free download for the Microsoft Word "viewer" that opens, but cannot change, MS Word documents. However, consider what would happen if you needed to download a special "viewer" for every possible word processing program that your correspondents used. PDF has gained wide acceptance as the "common denominator" for documents formatted for print (e.g. the IRS uses it for tax forms) and so downloading just this one piece of software allows you to open documents produced with many different kinds of software. How are PDF documents created? Ah, there's the rub. The straightforward solution is to purchase the "full" version of Adobe Acrobat (usually $200+) which, essentially, allows you to "print" a document to a PDF file as easily as you send it to any other printer. Other shareware or less expensive solutions are available, and there are web sites that will take files in proprietary (e.g. MS Word, MS Excel) and convert them to PDF for low or no charge. It is, in fact, so easy to create a PDF once Acrobat is installed, that some web managers are tempted to post almost everything in PDF rather than take the extra step to convert it to well-formed HTML. Comments?If you have comments on this document or suggestions for improvement, please send them to: Nancy Shoemaker |
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