Acrobat or Word or Zipped or all of 'em

[zonkd]

I'd like to offer downloads of archives on the site. I've not done it before. Is there a strong preference, a good reason, to offer the pages in Word rather than Acrobat, or the other way about, or both please, Experts?

Is it always a good idea to zip them, or only if they are particularly large? (These pages look to be around 45 kb in Acrobat.)

Do experts use some special code for the download-er, or is a normal link sufficient?

Many thanks in advance for advice.

[travelin cat]

zonkd,

I'd go for the .pdf files. Most (I have heard in excess of 90%) viewers have the plug in and the pages look perfect cross platform, as opposed to a Word .doc, or even .rtf.

We have dozens of clients that have similiar archives and they are all in acrobat format... I never hear complaints.

Don't zip them! You want them to open right away in the browser. Just make sure that you optimize them for the smallest possible size. Use a standard link like to any other page.....

[jetboy]

Acrobat files open in an instance of Acrobat inside the browser window by default. If you zip them they won't. The same *can* apply to Word and Excel, but I'm don't know if it's default behaviour.

You can force a download in Apache by assigning a nonsense MIME-type to a file extension:

AddType application/download-this .pdf

[zonkd]

travelin cat, jetboy

Many thanks for your advice. Very much appreciated.

I've tried with both methods. Word is dead simple, and very easy to edit the pages to be archived.

Acrobat is proving a problem. Deleting unwanted parts of the pages seems quite complicated. Downloading from the site seems the best way with Acrobat.

It ought to be simple to convert to Acrobat in Word. But no matter how many times I reinstall acrobat, I get this error message: "PDFMaker canot locate the Acrobat Distiller printer driver. Reinstall A Acrobat."