Distributing PDF Document Collections

After you’ve established your PDF document collections, you can make them available to your coworkers in a couple of ways. One of the most popular methods is to back up one or more of the collections (depending upon the number of PDF files they contain) on CD-ROMs that you can send out or make available for use from a central archive. Another method available to users whose computers are part of a company-wide network is to copy the PDF document collections onto a volume on the network server and share that volume with all the users who need to access its information.
The biggest potential problem with making PDF document collections available on a network is that together they can eat up a lot of disk space, depending upon how many PDF files they contain. Of course, this isn’t a problem when you distribute collections on individual CD-ROMs, although it does mean that you have to be smart about how you classify and categorize the collections on each CD-ROM because they can only be mounted and searched individually. This means that you can’t peruse the various collection folders at one time as you can when they’re all located together on a shared volume of a network. You may wonder about making PDF document collections available from a corporate intranet or Internet Web site. Unfortunately, as of now, the only way to make PDF document collections searchable on Web servers is with the Adobe PDF iFilter, a free downloadable DLL (Dynamic Link Library) that enables searching PDF files using Microsoft’s specifications for filtering text. Of course, this is no solution if your company doesn’t happen to use a version of the Microsoft Internet Information Server and Microsoft Index Server (both of which have to be in place for the PDF iFilter to work). For more information on the Adobe iFilter and to download it, go to the following Web address:
www.adobe.com/support/downloads