reporting media/method

[Daniel]

we are using VP8 for our major document-Annual report, 3 volumes between 300
et 450 pages each, averaging 25 chapters. They are published as 3 PDFs on
internet, It this the best method for such a large project? I am not
familiar with html usage advantages or disadvantages; it there examples
where drilldown possibilities are used? Any comments or references would be
appreciated.
TX
Dan

[Robert Casey]

Daniel wrote:

I have nine family histories on my web site - in both HTML and Acrobat formats.
The HTML look and feel is much worse than the exact copy of Acrobat. So,
from a quality point of view - Acrobat wins easily (when generated by Ventura
which has pretty average HTML generator). Also, Acrobat has the look and feel
of
a reproduction of your real paper based Annual Report.

I have another issue which may not affect you as much - the level of technical
ability / capability of your audience. There are people out there (although
few)
that do not have Acrobat or have a more difficult time navigating within
Acrobat.
Also, there are lot of people without high speed connections (although few) and
Acrobat Reader has a default value to download the entire file (each user can
turn this feature off - this was Acrobat V4 and V5, maybe Adobe fixed this
with V6). Do not know the skill level of audience as did not mention the type
of business the Annual Report is for. My books are 600 to 800 pages each
and primarly text only (buy the books & CD-ROMs for photographs and images).

Size-wise, Ventura V8 produces about equal size web documents (unless you use
a lot of tabs which are converted to HTML space sequences). You will still
need some HTML (or JAVA) for the highest levels of your web site for navigation.

You can visit my web site at http://www.rcasey.net and compare the differences.
My primary thrust is book publishing (as your annual report probably is) and
the Acrobat is a excellent electronic reproduction of the paper version. I also

generate HMTL for low skilled family history buffs and to get into search
engines
better. HTML does take more time to generate and each chapter generates
a separate HTML page (HTML pages do not necessarily match paper chapter
sizes). I constantly re-size my chapters for the low speed audience - less
important
these days than it was five years ago when I started.

Robert - Austin, TX

[Ian Langfield-Smith]

Hi Daniel

I can only respond as one who looks at such fiels on the internet. I
much prefer to be able to downlaod and archive files. This mean that for
me, pdf is the preferred mode.

Best wishes

Ian