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Byteserving: When the server is configured correctly, and also the user's
set up, plus the document has been optimized, byteserving occurs
automatically. When it seems to work properly in one browser, but not in
another one on the same machine, you'd have to check the actual
installation. When you install Acrobat (whatever product), it looks for the
"preferred" web browser, and installs the plug-in there. If you have more
than one browser you use, you might have to install the plug-ins manually.
The ReadMe document should be of sufficient help.
Security: you can set the security options. You do have a setting which
does not allow altering the document, and you will have to protect the
changing of security settings with a password. However, as long as you
allow printing, there is always a way for the end user to get an unsecured
version of the document which can then be modified. This is a flaw in
Acrobat, that the printing to file, or to another Acrobat generating
application, option is not suppressed when a document is protected. If this
is actually an issue, you would have to look out for a third-party security
system, such as FileOpen by FileOpen (http://www.fileopen.com).
Indexes: Indexes with Catalog work _in a file server environment only_.
That means that Catalog is useless for a webserver environment. In this
case, you would neeed an indexing/search engine which does support PDF, as
the search function is provided by the server. In a file server environment
(CD-ROM, harddisk, file server), Catalog does work.
Indexes again: So far, it is not possible to programmatically unmount an
index. Such a feature might be eventually available, as there is a grand
demand for it. It is possible to automatically mount an index (I guess
that's what you have done, concluding from your description on how hard it
is to get rid of indexes.)
Hope, this can help.
Max Wyss
PRODOK Engineering
Low Paper workflows, Smart documents, PDF forms
CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland
I was finishing up a pdf of a 750+ page manual in Framemaker, which was
about 6.1 mb when I first distilled it. The person I'm preparing it for is
going to put it on a closed affiliate company website for customers who pay
for an account
there. That affiliate of ours is concerned about download times and byte
serving problems. They also wanted the index that Acrobat Catalog makes to
be included. They spoke of problems with byte-serving if looking at an
optimized pdf in IE5 although no problem with Netscape. Security on the pdf
was something I was concerned about too because although the affiliate
company initially receiving this is not someone we mind altering its
format, we would want the end user to not be able to change the document;
every time you resave a pdf you have to build a new index in Catalog...
So, here's the problem: to help this affiliate's concerns, I created
optimized and
non-optimized versions of the pdf this afternoon, as well as versions with
and without
security and put them in different folders to go on the same cdrom.
I found that when testing the Search function in Acrobat to see if it worked
in each pdf after building each index, every time I would open a different
pdf version, Acrobat remembered the index path of the last index I accessed
and added it to the list of index path choices for the user to access when
Searching. It seemed impossible to get it to stop doing that even though you
can unselect ("remove") an index, but then the next one you open is going to
have the same problem. I suppose the problem will be over with when the
affiliate decides which one he wants to use and puts it on his website
because then there will, I suppose, be only one index path for them to
choose from (unless the same computer that has the server also stores all
the versions I'm going to send the affiliate on a cdrom today...). I only
want each pdf to access the index that is in its own folder, as I originally
built the index and set up the pdf to link to. But it seems that Acrobat
remembers previous index paths each time you open up another copy.
