Re: Acrobat Reader and "post-it" notes

[Max Wyss <prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch>]

You're welcome, Gilda,

I am pretty sure that the Business Tools are worth every penny, 
unless your system administrators will eventually be supposed to 
create PDFs as well; then, they would need the full Acrobat version 
anyway.

To your question 1: there is one issue which should not be forgotten: 
how binding are the base documents? If they are kind of legally or 
organisatorily binding, distributing RTF (or any editable format) is 
not a very good idea <g>, as they can easily be modified beyond your 
reach of control. For this, the annotation feature can have vital 
advantages, as the base document is not modified, but just annotated.

I must say that I barely try to create RTF from Frame. I believe to 
remember that I had serious problems some time ago, but that the 
newer versions might have fixed it. But still, the editable format 
issue is still there.

To question 2: I don't know your workflows within your organization, 
but I am sure that there are cases where documents must be approved 
by some kind of supervisor (for example travel expense reports or 
so). Now, this can be done completely paper based, where the 
requester signs  the document, and the supervisor adds the signature. 
This can be done electronically by using electronic forms and digital 
signatures. With the digital signature the signer adds some 
information to the document which sets a time stamp on the document, 
locking it against further _unnoticeable_ modification, and which can 
be used to confirm the identity of the signer. In a PDF environment, 
all the elements are essentially given, but they require the ability 
to save a document.

So, I could imagine that one day you have enough of shuffling paper 
and want to have your requests etc. done electronically. That's where 
you would have to introduce some kind of digital signature.

Similar reasoning does also work for a general document approval process.

Hope, this can help.



Max Wyss
PRODOK Engineering
Low Paper workflows, Smart documents, PDF forms
CH-8906 Bonstetten, Switzerland

Fax:  +41 1 700 20 37
e-mail:  mailto:prodok -at- prodok -dot- ch
http://www.prodok.ch



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Thanks for your responses. Too bad - I was hoping there was a way to do
annotations with just plain Acrobat Reader. I'm sure I can't get upper
management to buy into the idea of purchasing Business Tools for all System
Admins at all customer sites.

So now, I have two more questions:

1. The reason I asked the original question is because we currently
distribute that document in rtf format, so that each System Admin can use
Word or WordPad to add details specific to his or her own organization. But
I HATE having to use Word to create that rtf file. We tried creating it in
Frame, as we do all our other documents, and then saving as rtf, but it
didn't work. Is there a special trick to making the conversion work
properly?



2.  Max Wyss said: