June 1999 Meeting Report
by Howard L. Bonar
Secretary, Alaska Computer Society

The June 1999 meeting of the Alaska Computer Society was held at its regular location at Providence Hospital starting at 7:05 pm.

Questions and Answers

The first part of the program was the question and answer session. A lady member receives mail normally from everyone except her brother. When she tries to view his messages, the address and header appear as usual but the body of the message doesn't appear until she clicks on the blank page. It was suggested that the brother may be sending his mail as all html and that may be a problem.

Bronwyn Hillman reported that the Service Pack 1 for Win98 is now available for downloading from Microsoft. Service Pack 1 is free plus $5 for shipping and handling. You can also upgrade to "The Second Edition" of Windows 98 for $19.95 plus $5.00 S&H. To check it out or order, log on at: www.Microsoft.com/windows98/highlights/windows98se.asp.

Meeting

The official meeting started at 7:20 pm. Vice President Matt Childs introduced the board members, SIG (Special Interest Group) leaders and volunteers present. He listed the membership benefits of our organization including our fine news letter.

Ms. Consuelo K. Wassink reported on the great work the local chapter of "Society for Technical Communications" is doing and praised their newsletter. She says the organization would be of interest to many of our members. Their meetings are suspended for the Summer but we should check them out when they reconvene. We will check with them and perhaps add them to our meeting calendar.

Howard Bonar reported on the Software Evaluation Program and pointed out we have a number of free ware and shareware products and some try before you buy items that do not require a review or deposit.

Two door prizes were awarded to members. Courtesy of Sourdough Productions, a pair of tickets to the Blues Festival to be held Saturday at Kincaid Park was won by Al Schuerger. An InfoTalk Internet telephone system courtesy of Inno Media was won by Warren Enyeart.

The Presentation

Chad Fowler, one of the trainers for The Adobe Store at Time Frame in Anchorage gave us the latest information on Adobe Acrobat version 4.0. John Attebury, their representative for licensing and sales, offered additional comments and passed out brochures containing information about the product line and how it might be integrated into one's business activities.

The main point of the presentation was that Adobe is "NOT" a document production program but rather a document communication utility. With it, any document, generated in any application on any platform can be sent electronically to any other platform and be viewed in its intended form with all of the color, fonts, graphics, and formatting in place. Acrobat uses the Portable document format (.PDF) which was developed to fulfill the need for this capability.

It is outstanding in its ability to take graphics from any source, combine several sources into one document and send the finished product to almost anyone and have it appear on screen or in print looking just like the original.

The Acrobat Reader that is provided free by virtually all software companies along with their product make it almost universally available. You can download it for free from a number of web sites including www.Adobe.com. With it you can view, and print your received document regardless of its source.

In the latest versions of Microsoft Office it is possible to drag and drop a document from any of their applications to the Adobe Acrobat icon on the desk top and the document will be automatically translated into the PDF format - ready to be sent on to its final destination.

The functionality of Acrobat is making it possible for many firms to store all of their manuals electronically in a centrally located server as PDF files. When needed, they can print out only those pages that are needed at any one time. GCI and Alyeska Pipeline are reported to be transferring all of their manuals to PDF format. It will save them a great deal in printing costs and storage room. Updating manuals can be almost instantaneous and automatic.

Multimedia objects can be embedded in the PDF document. Use of these does complicate the exporting of the document since the objects are recorded separately and will need to be sent along as attachments. The receiver must also have the correct media players.

Acrobat Version 4 has several utilities that add to its versatility including the ability to zoom from 2 to 1600%. The largest page size was 15 feet.

Capture: The scanner utility which includes an Optical Character Reader (OCR) function. As it scans in a document, it will automatically look for the font that most closely resembles the original.

Distiller - among other things, it interprets post script instructions and converts them to the PDF format.

Adobe can be used to make and fill out Fax cover sheets. Design your cover letter, assign field names to each entry item, and then just fill in the forms to prepare for sending. In the Acrobat reader, data can be entered into the forms but the results cannot be saved - It was not clear whether or not you could send the completed sheet.

A commercial version of Capture, the scanner function, is available. It is leased, not sold, and the price is based on the number of copies made. It has a built in counter. Function wise, it is similar to the version which comes with Acrobat but it is designed for automatic operation in a commercial shop where hundreds or thousands of pages are being scanned in an operation. To be effective it works with an automatic page feed scanner.

The price for 20,000 scans is $629 ( that's a lot of pages). The one million scan license is $15,000. It sounds expensive but the real cost is the amount of manual labor that is eliminated by automating the processes. A careful cost analysis will show what a bargain it really is

One law office user of Acrobat has enabled tele-commuting for its staff by scanning all of the incoming mail into Acrobat then e-mailing the PDF files to the attorneys working from their home offices.

Sticky notes can be added to the documents making consultations highly productive. Security can be established on a document determining whether or not it can be printed, edited, or sent on.

There is some concern whether XML (Extensible Markup Language) will make PDF obsolete. The answer from Adobe is No! XML is designed for the data processing of text where every element in the document is treated as a field type and a value. It may eventually form the basis for widespread e-commerce.

XML is a simplified version of the original universal computer language, Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML). Both Microsoft and Netscape have announced XML support in their version 5 browsers. There are a lot of issues to be resolved before XML becomes mature.

The Adobe Store at Time Frame is located at 300 West 36th Avenue in Anchorage. For more information, give them a call at 907 562-0590 or visit their web page at www.AdobeStore.com. To check out Adobe, visit www.Adobe.com.