Data Formats Books

Any criticisms you have encountered about this book being biased towards prepress are true. But if you are involved with PDF in prepress, this book is very good.

This book will take you from beginner (but not novice) to advanced intermediate. It won't take you to expert; but then expert comes with experience. Given that each prepress environment has its own peculiarities, you'll have to work within your system to take it to its limits. This book can help some of the way.

My only complaint is related to my personal situation. On occasions, concerning some particularly fine points, the book suggests "ask your prepress partner". I am trying to become that prepress person, so I found this frustrating. Understandable, but frustrating.

I needed something more comprehensive and revealing than the usual offering of beginners texts. Yet, I WAS a beginner.

This book not only covers the general abilities of Acrobat, it discuses little known intricacies and technical issues that will make you a power user in record time.

Remarkably, the information is explained in simple, ordinary language.

I started working for a medium sized ad agency 2 years ago. Every document we produce has to be made in to PDF format for review by our clients. I could make a PDF, but really had no true understanding of the settings and what I was really doing. This book is truly excellent at giving a novice a complete understanding of the PDF format. For someone already knowlegeable about the PDF format it is also a very valuable reference. This is one of the most useful computer books I have bought in years and I buy alot of them. When our tech-guy has problems with Acrobat he comes to me and borrows this book.

The best thing about the book is that it breaks down PDF creation by program. For example, if you use Quark Xpress there is a chapter dedicated on how to use Acrobat with Quark. If you use Microsoft Word there is another chapter on using Acrobat with it. These chapters present you with real world scenarios and how to deal with them.

This is not some kind of quick start guide. It does get in to some detail and that helped me a great deal. It doesn't just gloss-over a subject or give you bare-bones steps on how to do something.

This is an easy to understand book that will help out anbody at any level with using Acrobat. I can't say enough good things about it. This is the first book I have purchased in the "Real World" series of books... it won't be my last!

This book is a thorough presentation on the subject of portable document formats or PDFs. PDFs, independent of platform and application, are a saving grace in the growing complexity of the computer world. Taz Tally's book addresses the variables involved in optimizing PDFs, starting from the creation of the original document all the way to the end product, the PDF. The book explains how to customize each file depending on its use. The author also covers manipulations of Acrobat Distiller and the versatile application Acrobat 6.

The book is well written and repetitive enough so if the reader missed the message on the first round, he or she will catch it again within just a few pages. The summaries, tables, and screen samples are particularly good and support the text. The author's style is as conversational as it gets within a technical book. I enjoyed his exclamations and honesty.

I am always interested in the completeness of the index since I often have the need to solve a specific problem. The sixteen-page index held enough detail to locate a reference in the book rather than having to search from page to page. The table of contents is also complete and easy-to-use.

This Sybex manual is an excellent resource for folks creating forms, presentations, and collaborative publications as well as learning about the more conventional conversion of digital documents to PDFs. This edition comes with a CD of material supporting the text including a demo of Sonar Bookends for automatic hyperlinking (to create a table of contents, an index, and more), FlightCheck, a prepress problem identifier, and a trial version of PitStop for visually checking and editing PDFs.

Dr. Tally is author of Avoiding the Scanning Blues, a guide to desktop scanning, and Electronic Publishing: Avoiding the Output Blues, a book on desktop publishing and Postscript files. Tally is also known for his entertaining seminars and instructional videos on a variety of computer topics.

This book is an excellent read, I just couldnt put it down - it took me 4 days to read and it was worth it!! It gives a real insight to what Belfast was like and in some parts still is. It's about a young Belfast girl and what she encounters during her life living in Belfast. You think you where there with her and feel so sorry for her, so sorry you just want to give her a big hug. It is a fictional story but what goes on in the book happens in real life (especially Northern Ireland). Must read!!!

This is a very good source of information for anyone new to PDF technology . The authrors cover the development of PDF from its beginnings as an open platform file format to how it has been adopted by the graphic arts industry and modern pre-press operators. I look forward to the next updated edition.

"Even the nails are line drawn into these details." While it may not "exactly" match your particular building situation (no dimensions), the details are preformatted on letter size title blocks. If you do cad for residential/light office designs, this is the book to get. There are even combinations of wood on steel posts and steel beams with various roofing, foundation, and beam on post applications. Structural details are the most teadious to do in cad for engineers, which makes having these available so vital to your cad reference library. BUY IT - YOU WON'T BE DISAPPOINTED.

Designed and written specifically to enable librarians to utilize XML to create and organize documents, fine-tune documents with special characters, using Cascading Style Sheets, and displaying information on a library website, "Using XML: a How-To-Do-It Manual and CD-ROM For Librarians by Kwong Bor NG (Associate Professor, Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, Queens College, CUNY) truly lives up to its promise as a 'librarian friendly' instructional manual which deftly combines a clearly written, step-by-step presentation with an accompanying CD-ROM which reproduces every exercise so librarians can compare their work on a chapter-by-chapter basis to insure that the documents they create are displaying properly. Simply stated, "Using XML" is an essential and very strongly recommended instructional reference that is a necessity for adequately training library staff members to make the most out of XML in the areas of technical services, metadata, system libraries, and library website development.

i did not get the answer for my doub, that is as u have described in the book ims dc about the date accepting system literals. but the never told how to get 4 digit year field format. i would appreciate if u would provide the answer for the above. thank you.

A must read for every COBOL programmer who handles IMS databases. A very Handy reference.

This book is a god-send for those of us who have to struggle with the often frustrating world of PDF documents on our computers. I was completely confused until I dug into this manual, which is relatively easy for a novice to understand. It has been a great help to me in find answers to problems I had with using PDF on a daily basis. I would highly recommend it.

There are several categories of hack in this book; two of them are "saving money" (finding ways to work with PDF's outside of Acrobat) and PDF in web design--using CGI scripting to serve up individual pages that have search text for example. A third type of hack are some old-school tricks that help make your PDF's more widely compatible. Good stuff, not crucial unless you happen to need it.

This is a very comprehensive solutions catalog on all kinds of PDF related issues. Each trick is described with step-by-step instructions and contains pointers to relevant resources. The chapter listing categorizes the hacks - Consuming PDF, Managing a Collection, Authoring and Self-Publishing, Creating PDF and Other Editions, Manipulating PDF files, Dynamic PDF, Scripting and Programming Acrobat.

I embrace the beauty of PDF as an end user and applications developer, but do not use Adobe Acrobat. Many of the tricks mentioned in the book is about this product. A problem is that the TOC does not tell whether or not a trick is Adobe Acrobat specific. Some of the hacks are like sections extracted from an advanced Adobe Acrobat user guide. As this is not obvious from the TOC, the content of the hack can be quite different from what I expected.

Despite this problem, the book is still a very useful one-stop resource about PDF. I will recommend this book to all who need to use or work with PDF.

The title is completely misleading.
I purchased this book and software from Broderbund, after reading the reviews posted here at Amazon, believing the book and software would help me covert PDF files that I could not Save or print in its orginal format into ones I could.
I can say for sure,in my opinion, the other reviews of this book led me down the "fools primrose path."
Perhaps I should have read the reviews more carefully.
Of course the fault is entirely mine.

With PDF files everywhere from web sites to help files, sooner or later you will run into a situation where you need to do something to a PDF file. For me the first time I realized I needed to do something I could not was when I needed to take one and convert it to a Word format so I could quickly outline the high points to study for a certification exam. After several hours I finally got it into a text file thanks to a web site that did the conversion. But even then I lost the tables, illustrations, etc. How to do that is one of the hacks included in this book. I wish it were printed a few years ago because it would have made my life easier.

After testing that hack I browsed through the book and kept finding myself asking "You can do that with a PDF file?" There are a lot of good tips in this book from making Acrobat startup faster, to converting PDF files, to automatic timed scrolling for easy reading, to creating a PDF using Word, WordPerfect, OpenOffice, Perl, HTML, PHP, and Java. With page after page of coding, this is a tremendously useful book for anyone who wants to create or edit PDF files or change the way Acrobat works with files. PDF Hacks: 100 Industrial-Strength Tips & Tools is very highly recommended and will be put on my shelf reserved for books I want to be able to access quickly.

If you have a multi-page Acrobat Form and want to automatically fill the form with data from your databases, optionally emailing/faxing it, PF-Merge will do that job for you, without programming. It also merges images!

Thought I share the above freely downloadable treasure with my fellow Cyberfriends. PF-Merge supports over 15 database platforms and its utilities do not time-out.

Many of the files I've wanted to parse were graphics files and were covered by the probably-better-known Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats (from O'Reilly), but this book goes beyond the file formats listed in that book to cover other useful formats like various database (dBase and FoxPro and SDF) and Spreadsheets and word processing (Word 3-5, WordStar, WordPerfect 5/5.1, RTF, AMI Pro 3-4). It's remarkably hard to find references to these various formats, especially all in one place like this. This book does cover graphics files, too, but that's not its principal focus.

There's a brief but useless section on SGML, but it doesn't do SGML justice; get Goldfarb's SGML Handbook if you want to know about SGML.

On the other hand, I found the description of GIF file parsing in this book to be technically superior to the description in the Encyclopedia of Graphics File Formats.

Overall, I like the style in which file formats are presented.

My copy of the book is dated 1995, and probably its main weakness is that is 5 years out of date. But I still regard it as quite a valuable reference for file formats that were already in existence at its time of publication.