Comments on: Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?

Question: Where Does He Get Those Wonderful Toys?

willmize — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 05:06:53 -0800

The pdf manifestos over at Change This are gorgeous! How are they doing it?

I'd love to create something similar yet simpler for articles I write on my own site.
What tools do you think they are using? Word? Powerpoint? Pagemaker? HTML? How do they embed the commands (print, save, magnify) and navigation (home, next, back)?
I have word, I have powerpoint, and rudimentary html skills and also the ability to print to create PDF's. I think I also have access to pagemaker, but I have no idea how to use it.
Help Obi Wan(s)!

By: alball

alball — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 05:49:37 -0800

The first step is to hire a good graphic designer. All the other stuff will come from that.

I would guess that they probably use InDesign to lay these out, and then export them as pdfs.

By: plinth

plinth — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 05:54:25 -0800

I poked inside the file and found this:
/Creator (Adobe InDesign CS \(3.0.1\))
/Author (Chris Houchens)
/Producer (Adobe PDF Library 6.0)

So InDesign is the app he used with built-in PDF export.
As for the navigation, those are just plain in-document links. The full screen mode is a document open action, the others are other actions attached to links.

By: zsazsa

zsazsa — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 05:59:38 -0800

You can do a lot with a PDF when you load it into Acrobat (the full one, not the reader). You can lay it out in the tool of your choice (from the PDF information, it looks like they used InDesign CS), and then add all those buttons, navigation, full-screen trigger, etc in Acrobat. InDesign may be more tightly integrated with Acrobat, and some of that functionality may be built-in, but I'm not sure.

As an aside, for the ultra-techies, features like this can be also done in L^AT_EX.

By: delfuego

delfuego — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 07:03:21 -0800

Of course, if you decide to emulate their PDFs, please don't also emulate their decision to automatically maximize the display of the PDFs as soon as they're opened in Acrobat. It's abhorrent to feel that your content is so important that it gives you the right to reset display prefs chosen by the user; it's sad that something this nice (the ChangeThis) presentations are marred by something this simple.

By: patgas

patgas — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 07:06:15 -0800

They look a lot like the subscriber PDFs I get from Before & After magazine. I wonder if the two share some designers?

By: Alt F4

Alt F4 — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 07:11:41 -0800

A side note ... if you're looking for someone to do something similar, you might do well to look for a "typesetter with a good design sense," rather than a "graphic designer." Might be tougher to find, but might be cheaper.

By: kirkaracha

kirkaracha — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 07:30:55 -0800

Their blog has an entry about how they designed the PDFs to be read on screen. PDFZone's ChangeThis Builds PDFs to Succeed Onscreen has more details:

ChangeThis authors are provided an MS Word template with stylesheets developed by the team. Once completed and returned, the text is saved to Rich Text Format, then imported into an Adobe InDesign template that directly mapps [sic] the Word stylesheets. Minor manual tweaking in Acrobat is the final step.

According to their Who's Who, the designer is Phoebe Espiritu. She's a former design director for AOL.

By: Mitheral

Mitheral — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 08:07:37 -0800

delfuego writes "Of course, if you decide to emulate their PDFs, please don't also emulate their decision to automatically maximize the display of the PDFs as soon as they're opened in Acrobat."

Please follow this advice, the automatic maximize no window control "feature" is pretty evil. Anyone know if I can diable this ability in Acrobat reader? I can see it throwing my father for a real loop.

By: Civil_Disobedient

Civil_Disobedient — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 08:44:00 -0800

I was just about to say that I've seen this exact layout before, down to the color scheme (design pirates!), until I realized the original document I saw was from here. Whoops.

And yeah, InDesign rocks. But I've found that importing Word documents tends to mangle the styles, or at least, give me a hundred default styles that I'm not interested in, but that were embedded with the default document but never used.

The way InDesign handles styles (paragraph and character) is simply, wonderfully marvelous. Provided you've got enough screen real estate. :)

By: grouse

grouse — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 10:21:24 -0800

Mitheral: You probably already knew that Ctrl+L (or Cmd+L for Macs) ends the full screen mode, but I'm not sure how to disable it in advance.

By: mark7570

mark7570 — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 10:46:38 -0800

I know Phoebe - great designer - and I'll alert her to this thread.

By: fatllama

fatllama — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 12:47:09 -0800

Almost looks like something done with the beamer LaTeX class.

By: Mitheral

Mitheral — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 16:03:26 -0800

grouse writes "Mitheral: You probably already knew that Ctrl+L (or Cmd+L for Macs) ends the full screen mode"

Thanks grouse, I didn't know that. Sure going to make supporting this over the phone easier if it comes up rather than trying to figure out where/what the unfullscreen link is (assuming the control freak artist put one in).

By: trevyn

trevyn — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 16:13:09 -0800

If you like the look, but don't have the graphic design skillz, Apple's Pages has quite a bit of style and a bunch of very classy templates. It outputs to PDF, too.

By: obiwanwasabi

obiwanwasabi — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 16:25:38 -0800

Help Obi Wan(s)!

Sorry - I got nothin'.

By: blag

blag — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 18:16:41 -0800

For those pissed off with the full-screen takeover, consider using Foxit as your PDF reader. As a bonus, it loads up in about 1/10th of the time Acrobat takes. Free.

By: yclipse

yclipse — Thu, 09 Jun 2005 20:20:37 -0800

Check out the Large Format PDF entry at this site for some information on doing something similar, though with a little less panache.