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Nigel Curtis of Midlands-based CW Corporate Communications took exception to last month’s ezine article about PDFs potentially being boring. He says that, if handled correctly, PDFs can be anything but. He has a sample for you to download too to prove his point. PDFs boring?! How very dare you! Yes, the Yudu alternative highlighted in last month’s CiB e-zine – and other similar e-brochure products - are all very interesting and flashy and all that but, possibly, maybe, just a little bit gimmicky? Apart from the theatrical page turning (which does actually get a bit tiresome when the novelty wears off) you can get all the interactivity these products offer, and more, from the humble old PDF. Maybe it’s a case of familiarity breeding complacency with Adobe’s omnipresent Acrobat Reader, but surely the fact that it is so universal is a massive boost to the accessibility of PDFs - whether you are working at home on a domestic PC, on a laptop in a hotel room or behind the mighty firewalls of a multinational. What if your IT department won’t let you stream content onto your desktop in the office? Or you can’t get online on the train? Or your home computer or broadband connection isn’t quite up to speed? All you need is a reasonably up to date version of Acrobat Reader to access all the functionality and bells and whistles that an interactive PDF can offer. The key, though, is to ensure your PDF has been designed – or redesigned – to be viewed on screen as an electronic publication. Too many organisations simply convert a printed newsletter or brochure to PDF and shove it on their website or email it to people, often extolling their green credentials for reducing their print run. Trouble is, it’s invariably impossible to read on the computer screen so people simply print it out anyway. (The A4 portrait monitor never really caught on!) But the power of the truly interactive PDF is that you don’t actually want or need to print it because you would miss a lot of the content if you did. Not to mention all the fun of clicking buttons and rolling your cursor over different sections to reveal hidden text or images or to launch an audio or video clip. You don’t need to scroll down or around a page, to find more content, or zoom in to be able to read it – it should all be there on the page view in front of you; or available at the click of a button. In fact, the document can launch full screen so you can give it your undivided attention – along with obvious escape navigation so you can get back to your desktop without frustration. Audio and video files can be compressed and embedded with ease within an i-pdf, as can links to other pdfs or website/intranet pages or email addresses or other files such as Word docs or spreadsheets or Powerpoint presentations. An i-pdf can be emailed, hosted on a server for individual download or distributed on CDs or DVDs. With the huge storage capacity of DVD, all manner of digital assets can be archived on disc and an i-pdf is the perfect user-friendly interface to access the content. Host it on a network server and the potential is vast. A properly conceived, designed and constructed interactive PDF really does tick all the boxes when it comes to ease of use, versatility, accessibility and functionality as well as providing novelty and interest for the reader. Over the past 18 months or so at CW, we have been really pushing the boundaries of what we can achieve with i-pdfs to the extent that one of our clients – a high ranking internal communications manager in a very well known FTSE100 company declared : “This is the future of internal comms in our business!” And by the way…for stalwart advocates of Flash or QuickTime only solutions, you can still put them in your PDF and benefit from both technologies all at the same time. What a lovely way of working together! So, dismiss PDFs at your peril we say. They are only as boring as you make them… Nigel Curtis is an IoIC Fellow and managing director of Midlands-based CW Corporate Communications which celebrates its 20th anniversary in 2008. (nigel.curtis@cwcorpcomms.co.uk)
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