Mappers, I usually wait more than a day to summarize responses but the replies came thick and fast on this one. I guess there was a innate hunger for a topic other than spam! I asked for comments about using Acrobat to generate pdf output from MapInfo, in particular: Do the pdf files look pretty true to the originals? Does printed output of the pdf file compare well with printing direct from MapInfo? Combining pdf files to get map illustrations into reports. Overall the response was overwhelmingly positive that pdf was a great way to go for getting good output, ease of circulating results across machines, platforms, printers, clients... Indeed, some correspondents found output from pdfs was better than direct from MapInfo! The third part of my inquiry was only touched upon by the responses (I asked it rather cryptically and it is more of an Acrobat question than a MapInfo one; but James Marlow Terry O'Brien caught it) but the vote was pretty positive on that one as well. There were some qualified opinions, but even here (at least for messages directed to the list rather than to me), other users responded with techniques to solve these problems, demonstrating once again how useful mapinfo-l can be. Even those who reported problems still recommended using Acrobat. Jam Buddy (Avenza) might be an alternative for those needing to provide access to attribute data) within a distributed map. Some of the specifics from responders include: Be sure to go for Acrobat 4, much improved from 3 (some of the problems listed below may be fixed in 4, I couldn't always tell which version the correspondent had) Be careful with custom symbols and special characters. Distiller Assistant can be used to get higher resolution than PDFWriter (you may have to adjust the default resolution for Distiller). To avoid ragged bitmaps try using Distiller and/or zip rather than jpeg compression. OK, lets just say there were many votes for using Distiller! Watch out for text displacement (not much but if placement is critical be aware) Try to stick to PS fonts. Line symbols may be translated into standard lines. Hatched patterns may be converted to solids. For larger layouts than the defaults, don't forget custom sizes. There can be some color shift when printing from pdf to printers, be careful if you are trying to distinguish between subtle shades (they may not be distinguishable). Thanks for the great (and fast) replies to the many respondents including: Tim Albert Sylvia Blair Frank Boscoe Jo Ellen Brandmeyer Dyan Catamaran Kiesett V Collier Mats Elfstr�m Joseph Harrison Sam Kome Bill Landis Yannick Leduc Greg Lindner James Marlow Brad Mathews Terry O'Brien Steve Wallace Adrian Walls David Ward and those whose messages past this one in the ether... Declan (who expects to be purchasing Acrobat) ---------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe from this list, send e-mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] and put "unsubscribe MAPINFO-L" in the message body, or contact [EMAIL PROTECTED]
