Others say...

"Great Content, Dreadful layout"
Be advised that, while the content of this book is great, the formatting and layout are dreadful. I got it to read, so I could understand of Acrobat's diverse features. I've ended up using it purely as a reference. Every time I've tried to read it, I've given up in frustration after a few paragraphs.

Like many technical manuals, the book is wide at 7.5 inches. A wide-format page calls for creativity in how text is formatted. With my book-length Lord of the Rings chronology, I used that extra width for some 1200 sidebar references to passages in Tolkien's writings. That worked quite well, much better than putting those references (footnote-like) at the bottom of the page.

This book shows no such creativity. The body type is far too small (roughly 9 points) and appears to be printed in grey ink rather than black. The numerous 5 1/2-inch-wide lines of small type make it almost impossible for most readers to jump from the end of one line to the start of the next. In general, any text with more than 70-75 characters per line is hard to read. This book has page after page with 105-110 characters per line. Sheer misery. As any graphics pro will tell you, tiny type and a wide format don't go together. With a bit of work, the staff at Wiley could have created a much better looking book.

The one saving grace is that the book includes a CD with the book as a PDF. Blown up 200%, it is a bit easier to read. (I've even thought of using my Mac's text-to-speech feature to have it read to me.) But the book on CD is almost a case study in how not to do an ebook. It's an enormous 255 meg file that causes Preview (on Macs) to moan and groan. And worse than that, it's formatted just like the printed book, rather than as a demonstration of how PDF can create an ebook that's better than the printed version in some ways. I can at least understand why Wiley might have used tiny type to reduce the page count in their print version. But I can't figure out why they'd do that with an ebook, where pages are virtual and free.

In short, this book is an excellent reference to Acrobat 8, particularly since Adobe no longer includes printed manuals with their products. If that's what you need, look no further. But unless your eyes are young and sharp, don't buy this to read and study, particularly not while traveling by bus, train or plane. Like a dictionary, it's for reference only.

--Mike Perry, Seattle Untangling Tolkien: A Chronology and Commentary for The Lord of the Rings

"1085 Pages, Tiny Type - This is Indeed a Bible"
Over a thousand pages and the type is small -- just like a real Bible. This book is everything you could possibly have wanted to know about Adobe Acrobat 8. And beyond Acrobat 8 itself, the book discusses and includes on a CD a number of third party add in packages that further extend what Acrobat will do.

Most people who have only Acrobat Reader to read .pdf files will be surprised to find that the program that produces the .pdf file is a huge and powerful software system. This book has everything you could possibly want to know about Acrobat. As with the Acrobat software itself, the book covers both the Windows and the MAC operating environments. In general these are the same, but in several cases where they are different screen shots off of both computers are included.

The book is designed as a reference book where you will jump to just the section containing the information about what you want to do rather than reading straight through like a mystery book. As such it has a pretty good table of contents and a 45 page index at the end of the book.