NCEAS Commonly Used Software

From NCEAS Knowledge Base

Acrobat

What is Acrobat?

Adobe Acrobat itself is a commercial solution using an open standard (pdf) to document formatting that allows the creation of complex documents – with figures, tables, etc. – that are completely portable across many types of computers (Windows, Mac, Linux/UNIX) and across network connections like the WWW. The following are free programs you can use to create and read Adobe Acrobat documents:

• PDFCreator is a tool to create pdf documents from any Windows application. OS X and every modern Linux distro have this feature by default
• Adobe Acrobat Reader can read these pdf formatted files. It is not open source, but a free download that is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux/UNIX computers. PDF viewers are installed by default on OS X and Linux.

Acrobat's Use at NCEAS

We are using Acrobat here at NCEAS to publish documents on the Web that are difficult to format in HTML but are easily formatted by common word processors like MS Word and WordPerfect. We first create pdf documents using PDFCreator and post them on our web site. Then, our clients use Acrobat Reader to view the pdf files that they download from our site using their web browser. Using Acrobat Reader is transparent to most people and is installed by default on all of our NCEAS computers. Publishing documents in pdf format saves time and more accurately formats complex documents than we can achieve using HTML.

Alternatives

• OpenOffice.org also allows exporting to PDF without the need for any other software.

• Scribus claims their PDF output supports the PDF format better than any commercial package, but scribus is a desktop publishing app