PDF file names

[Stuart Burnfield]

Hi Caroline -

I usually do have the product version number in the PDF file name.

Note that you can put a lot of version information in the metadata. If 
you open one of your PDFs in Adobe Reader and select File > Properties 
(or press Ctrl-d), you'll see the Document Properties dialog. On the 
Description tab there are fields for Title, Author, Subject and 
Keywords. A couple of these fields may already have default values.

FrameMaker and AuthorIT (and probably other publishing tools) let you 
set a lot of this information in the source document. For example, you 
could add the version number to the Title and put the platform and 
edition in the Keywords (Enterprise Edition for UNIX/Linux).

If you have Acrobat you can open the PDF and edit the values in the doc 
properties directly. You can also set a property (I think it's in the 
Open Options) called something like Display Title in Title Bar. When a 
customer opens the PDF, instead of just displaying file name the title 
bar will display whatever you put in the Title field (e.g. Toaster Oven 
User Guide V2.20).

Finally, if the person who creates the CD finds it a lot of work, it 
sound like they're manually copying and renaming files. There should be 
a build script that copies all the required files from the development 
hierarchy on the server to the standard CD folder structure. Ideally 
this should be almost a one-step process--simply kick off the buildCD 
script then check the return code at the end to confirm that it ended 
successfully.

As long as you are disciplined at naming all the PDFs in a standard, 
predictable way (e.g. <manualname>_<version>.pdf) this should work well 
and will save a lot of time. The build script could be set up so that 
you pass it the version number when invoking it:

buildCD -v2.20

... and it plugs the version number into the file name when copying each 
PDF.

Let me know if any of this is not clear.

Regards

Stuart