When computers aren't speaking - desktop-publishing software

Nation's Business, Nov, 1993 by Jon Pepper, Albert G. Holzinger

Software by Adobe Systems Inc. of Mountain View, Calif., could make a big difference in the way you circulate documents among employees and customers.

The Acrobat family of programs is an elegant solution to an age-old desktop-computing problem: With few exceptions, complex documents created in word-processing, desktop-publishing, presentation, or other programs can be shared only among people with similar computers equipped with identical operating systems, application software, and fonts. Lacking this compatibility, which is indeed uncommon, the only alternative until now was to photocopy the documents and circulate them in paper form.

Artists at CAPPS Studio, a Chicago-based firm that produces four-color advertisements for business clients, faced such a problem:

The artists work on high-end Macs loaded with state-of-the-art drawing and layout programs, a large library of typefaces, and other sophisticated design tools; clients mostly have PCs, and those who do have Macs don't generally have full suites of software and fonts.

In response to customers' demands for color proofs delivered quickly, CAPPS implemented Adobe Acrobat technology. CAPPS uses Acrobat to "print" electronic proofs of its ads in Acrobat's Portable Document Format (PDF). The studio sends those proofs via modem to customers, who, using one of the Acrobat family of programs, can view them almost exactly as they appeared on the artists' computer displays.

Customers request changes in electronic "Post-it notes" and return the proofs to CAPPS for implementation.

"Acceptance of the process has been very high," says Christopher Miller, CAPPS's director of Macintosh.

Acrobat has the following three products that allow exchange of documents among computers running DOS, Windows, Unix, or Apple's System 7:

Reader ($50 each with substantial quantity discounts available) enables end-users of information to search through, view, and print PDF documents.

Exchange ($195) performs Reader functions and allows users to annotate the PDF files of others or create new ones from most off-the-shelf programs.

Distiller ($695, or $2,495 for a network version) translates old files created in Adobe's popular Postscript language into PDF format.

We found that a user can install these products intuitively and that they perform remarkably well. On the downside, the Reader program is too expensive for most small businesses to buy in quantity and give away to customers, and all three demand lots of computing power for satisfactory performance. The products' prices, however, will almost surely drop over time.

To learn more about the program, call Adobe at 1-800-833-6687.

An Imaging System That Could Save Trees

Another effort to reduce office paperwork comes from Pinnacle Micro, a company well-known for developing systems to store large quantities of computer data. Pinnacle, based in Irvine, Calif., has created the Paperless 1 document-imaging system, in which documents scanned into a system can be retrieved as images, saving tons of paper, filing cabinets, and file clerks' time.

Imaging systems are often expensive; considering what is included, the Paperless 1 system is an inexpensive $6,995. Distributed by Ingram Micro, the system includes a scanner, optical storage drive, and software.

HiJaak Pro Organizes Your Art Library

If you've bought any desktop-publishing or even word-processing programs over the years, chances are your hard disk is littered with "free" clip art as well as scanned-in images. It's also likely that these images are almost useless because they are uncataloged and probably in several incompatible formats.

An inexpensive but highly sophisticated program, HiJaak Pro 2.0 for Windows, by Inset Systems Inc., allows you to organize and browse through thumbnail versions of the images. Moreover, HiJaak will enable you to convert virtually any image into the format required by any other software program.

The program is a snap for the user to install and navigate, it can be customized easily, and it performs flawlessly on almost any Windows-capable PC.

Version 2.0 has a list price of $169 directly from Inset (call 1-800-374-6738), but you can find it at retail or mail-order outlets for about half that price. Included with the program are 500 free pieces of clip art.