Re: Acrobat Catalog and Index

[Anne Magee <magee -at- UNIVERSAL -dot- CA>]

Weiner, Kandis wrote:
>
> Howdy All,
>
> I'm reaching out from behind my desk to pick your collective brain about
> Adobe Acrobat Catalog and the Index feature...
>
> Anybody care to recount their experiences with the Adobe Catalog,
> specifically the Index? Any success/failure stories out there? Do users
> actually appreciate the index feature? Is it usable/useful? Do users need
> instructions on how to use the search tool in Reader to search Indexed
> documents? What about just notifying the user that the Index is available?
>
> I have not seen any examples of the Index, besides Adobes. Any pointers to
> examples and/or resources would be greatly appreciated!
>
> Thanks!
> Kandis Weiner.

I maintain two sets of user documentation, one with 39 manuals, the
other with 34. I use Adobe Catalog to index these.

I find the index to be very good and easy to use, and I use it myself
all the time. It's not perfect. For example, I can never find any
information on our environment variables since Catalog doesn't seem to
index words with underscores in them. But on the whole, it's faster than
locating the file by name, even if I know what file the information is
in.

I have, however, had a lot of trouble getting users and user support to
use it, even though the Customer Services Manager was very enthusiastic
and was supposed to add it to the training courses. I added a "Searching
the Manuals" section to the Read Me First manual, but I'm still not sure
that anyone uses it.

I'd still create the index, even if I knew for sure that I was the only
one using it. It doesn't take long to create but it saves me a lot of
time later. I use it not only to answer questions that user support
should be answering themselves, but to locate all the instances of an
item when it needs to be updated.

Anne Magee
Universal System Ltd.
Fredericton, NB, Canada

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