Designing screen PDF newsletters – Why and How?
February 11, 2007 – 3:44 pm
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!
Amazing.. I never thought that it’ll be that much easy.. but yet to try it
2 Responses to “Designing screen PDF newsletters – Why and How?”
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.
By Rob Cubbon on Mar 12, 2007
By Rob Cubbon on Mar 13, 2007