Designing screen PDF newsletters – Why and How? | Blog

Designing screen PDF newsletters – Why and How?

PDF newsletter Question: How can you disseminate a graphically interesting, beautifully designed small book to a large number of people cheaply?
Answer: Email a PDF.
Almost every computer has Adobe Reader (formerly called Acrobat Reader) and PDFs are widely used as a way to present information with a fixed layout similar to a paper publication.
Question: Why make a PDF newsletter?
Answer: It’s cheap. Why pay for printing when you can get you readers to do it themselves?

The advantages of PDF publishing over internet publishing are:
1 No need to worry about browser and platform differences or about being standards compliant – if you can view a PDF properly in Reader the chances are that everyone else in the world can.
2 You can use any font you want.
3 Vector graphics appear pin sharp at any magnification.
4 You don’t need an internet connection to read or print it.

Ah, I hear you say, the web is interactive but PDFs aren’t. Wrong again!

More about this subject and how to create them in InDesign.

Tags: Acrobat, adobe, InDesign, interactive pdf, PDF

This article was posted on Sunday, February 11th, 2007 at 3:44 pm and is filed under Acrobat, Artwork, Design, InDesign.
You can follow any responses to this article through the RSS 2.0 feed.

Download free “How to Market Yourself Online” ebook
Discover the secrets behind building a better web presence

Everything you will need to know about self-marketing on the web, including:

Creating websites
Setting up WordPress
Writing blog posts
Getting links
Driving traffic to your site
Using social media
Offering RSS feeds and subscriptions
Getting found on Google

6 Responses to “Designing screen PDF newsletters – Why and How?”

Rob Cubbon, on March 12th, 2007 at 11:58 pm, said:

I got an email from PDF illuminary Dan Brill from Graphic Exchange News who is an undoubted fan of this type of Rich PDF.

He says …

Nice piece on rich PDFs. We’ve been building them since 2004, using InDesign for everything possible, including the interface. Haven’t put much effort into it just lately because we still have trouble selling advertising for them, but I remain a big supporter … I’m hoping Apollo will push it along.

Thanks for your input, Dan. I guess we’ll have to wait for any improvement of the format.
Rob Cubbon, on March 13th, 2007 at 12:06 am, said:

Quark 7, although attempting to catch up with InDesign by offering transparency and drop shadows, still does not offer anything like the same capabilities when building PDFs.
mnorgovudkka, on December 29th, 2008 at 3:52 am, said:

Hy my name is mnorgovudkka
Im from mongolia
Buy
Fab, on April 22nd, 2009 at 4:41 pm, said:

Nice idea. It is much easier these days to turn just about any document into a ,pdf document.
Rob Cubbon, on April 25th, 2009 at 8:59 am, said:

Yes, Fab, PDFs are pretty ubiquitous today.
Scott, on November 17th, 2009 at 10:01 pm, said:

Great tip! You can just email a PDF to a bunch of people. Thanks!

Graphic and Web Designer London UK