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:
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 OpenOffice.org Writer. We first create pdf documents using PDFCreator and post them on our web site. Then, our clients use Adobe Reader to view the pdf files that they download from our site using their web browser. Using Adobe 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