Acrobat or HTML: pick the best path to the Web

Folio: The Magazine for Magazine Management, June 1, 1995 by John L. Cleveland

Publishing in cyberspace is no Sunday drive in the country. But with a clear vision of where you want to go, you improve the odds of arriving somewhere worthwhile. For the best route to getting your content online, evaluate what is most critical to your goal: keeping maximum control over the look of your document, or reaching the widest audience possible. The format you use to distribute your documents--most likely either Adobe Acrobat or Hypertext Markup language (HTML)--depends on this answer.

All about looking good

As a magazine publisher, one of your top concerns is likely to be preserving your content's visual integrity. If so, then Acrobat 2.0 from Adobe Systems Inc. is the most direct route--albeit not a perfect one--to the information highway.

Early online magazine pioneers, such as Time, Woman's Day and Omni, were forced to accept the limitations of text-based publishing. They spiced up their presentations with colorful graphics and sound, but it was clear that neither they nor their advertisers would be satisfied until the visual quality of electronic publishing neared that of the printed page.

Acrobat version 2.0, introduced last fall, does just that. It gives publishers a standard for preserving the most complex creations of their page layout artists across computer platforms and media. The Portable Document Format (PDF) at the heart of Acrobat technology is built around Adobe's Postscript page description language. A PDF document should look the same to any media or output device, regardless of which system it was created on.

Editors familiar with desktop publishing systems will find the Acrobat environment very comfortable. You can see documents on the screen exactly as they will look when printed and move text and graphics at the click of a mouse. Hyperlinks to other PDF documents are easy to create and maintain across platforms. The Associated Press has chosen Acrobat as its standard for electronic distribution of ads to newspapers, and The New York Times publishes the fax version of its front pages in PDF format through its own site on the World Wide Web.

Technically, the Web is a global network of linked computers that share information through Hypertext Transfer Protocol (http). Http uses HTML as the standard means of organizing information so it can be located and viewed online. But Adobe's PDF standard is rapidly being interwoven into the Web as well. Acrobat's ability to hyperlink to non-PDF documents, HTML included, has improved. Adobe is distributing its Acrobat Reader (needed to view PDF documents) freely through America Online and other Internet access providers. In April, the company announced an agreement with IBM and Netscape Communications, Inc. (which produces widely used Internet browsers), to incorporate the Acrobat Reader into all IBM PCs and bundled software. Other popular Internet browsing tools have also added PDF viewers as standard features.

Limited acceptance

Still, while Acrobat's acceptance is growing, the number of computer users who have PDF viewers remains a small percentage of the total market. Most home computer users don't have the memory, software or equipment to reproduce high quality images of pages downloaded from the Web. Like most of the superhighway, Acrobat remains a work in progress. Adobe continues to build new on-ramps, such as Acrobat Capture, a software package introduced this spring that can convert even scanned paper documents to PDF.

If you're willing to accept a primarily text-based presentation of your information online and want to reach everyone who can read a text file, then HTML is the only way to go. That's changing quickly, but it will be a good while before everyone has the ability to download and view a PDF document.

HTML has the widest reach

HTML lets Net surfers search computers around the world and leap among topics through hyperlinking. Graphics, sound and video files stored on the Web can be located and downloaded, but HTML'S own page-formatting capabilities are fairly limited. An HTML file is essentially a text file with embedded tags surrounding key parts of the document, e.g., a subhead. The file also contains pointers, called uniform resource locators, to related topics on the Web.

New, user-friendly software packages to help editors get their documents in HTML format seem to appear daily. Using these commercial tools, editors don't have to worry about preparing documents for the Web. The software does the HTML work as they concentrate on content. Some HTML tools also save text as Structured General Markup Language (SGML) documents. of SGML as HTML's mature big brother. (HTML is actually a subset of SGML.) SGML handles large document formatting, workflow management and cross-platform electronic publishing projects that HTML can't. For the purposes of magazine publishers, that richness is generally not necessary.

All of these technologies are converging. For now, it's important to understand the differences among the paths to the information superhighway because key bridges and overpasses aren't yet in place. In time, your readers won't notice a difference among PDF, HTMI, or SGML documents. And neither will you.