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moving around in a PDF file
On Monday, April 11, 2005, fishzle wrote:
"As I read the book, I found that sometimes I wanted to refer to a previous page, and instead of being able to click on the left page to go back, I had to move my mouse to a little box on the top left of the page. Not very good. Control was too small, too much mouse movement and placement. Sometimes I clicked the wrong icon, very frustrating."
Thanks for the feedback. Acrobat (and Reader) provides lots of ways of navigating through a document. In full-screen mode, you can click anywhere on the page (apart from the defined buttons) to move to the next page; shift-click to move to the previous page. And that's just the beginning. I mostly use the arrow keys, myself. The buttons are there as a fall-back, not as the best way of moving through the book.
John Berry
I came to very similar conclusions
Great minds think alike (yours being the greater).
When producing multiple documents of tutorials for users to view on screen I derived almost identical specifications. Horizontal, 2 columns, open setting, slightly bolder look.
Even though I am working in metric dimensions, I came up with a close match to the size which you've chosen. I did it by experimentation to simply see what was clearly legible without taking over too much of the screen.
Differences though are the need to break paragraphs more often, much akin to the newspaper style of from 1-3 sentences per paragraph along with generous before and after para spacing.
Also I stuck with sans serif fonts. Americans are a conservative lot and seem to not cope with modern style, but for the screen sans serif wins hands down.
My original selection which was highly legible on screen was Apple's Lucide Grande but I was frustrated by the inexplicable lack of Italics and had to switch to Microsoft's Verdana which is unfortunately not as polished.
2 columns work very well for tutorials. The subhead and instructions being in the left column and the graphics and captions on the right.
Something that really does need to be addressed is writing style. It is harder to read on screen and the writer needs to be much more concise and not ramble. This will be a hard habit to break. Like lawyers who are paid by the hour, journalists are paid by the word and both waste their clients time with excessive use of each.
Quantity is no substitute for quality. Less is more, as is evident in the Gettysburg address and Rev. Martin Luther Kings' great speeches.
Usability Review
To start with, I read the book on a 21" CRT running at 1280x1024 in 24 bit colour under windows XP sp2.
I found the font clear and comfortable to read.
I found the text density when running fullscreen a bit low. The low density makes it easy to read, but I found that I was continually turning the page (annoying).
As I read the book, I found that sometimes I wanted to refer to a previous page, and instead of being able to click on the left page to go back, I had to move my mouse to a little box on the top left of the page. Not very good. Control was too small, too much mouse movement and placement. Sometimes I clicked the wrong icon, very frustrating.
I would prefer to be able to click on the left page to go back a page, and the right side to go forward.
I agree with the other comment about locating the controls on the bottom right of the page.
I liked your article.
Hope this feedback helps your designs.
Regards.
Adapt for Palm/Pocket PC?
I think the design of Blind Shrike is great.
But I'd like to read the text on my Palm device, rather than on my Macintosh.
Adobe has a free Reader for Palm, but the way it automatically transfers pdfs from desktop to Palm device leaves much to be desired.
Is there a way the file can be easily retooled for maximum legibility on a 320x320 Palm device?
Re: Adapt for Palm/Pocket PC?
On Monday, April 4, 2005, sshaviro wrote:
"Is there a way the file can be easily retooled for maximum legibility on a 320x320 Palm device?"
That's another, and different, design problem -- one I haven't tackled yet. I'm sure it can.
John Berry
Placement of navigation buttons distracting
I prefer placing the navigation arrows on the lower right corner of page. Having them on the left makes them too prominent, in my opinion -- after reaching the end of a line of text and looking back to the left, the reader's eye may be attracted to the arrows instead of the left margin of the text itself.
I appreciate the author's effort to format the page to fit a computer screen. As stated in the article, so many of the e-magazines produced are still oriented as if for a printed project, which makes on-screen reading difficult. I find myself having to scroll up and down a page several times in order to read the columns of text. Orienting the page horizontally makes more sense and still allows for printing, if desired. I wish more of the digital user guides for software were oriented this way!
PDF requires careful thought and design for use as screen readin
The PDF format has become ubiquitous for posting existing documents online. Unfortunately, little thought seems to be given to making the on-screen presentation of the printed page palatable to on-line readers. Often, those little 1 page Word documents should be posted as HTML. But for those documents where PDF is the right answer just pushing the "export to PDF" button can create a document that is hard to read and navigate online. I appreciate the author's thoughts on this for an online book (though I would recommend that the navigation should be at the lower right of the page to take advantage of the normal flow of the text). Check out Before&After's site for their presentation of online articles to see this done really well: http://www.bamagazine.com/. They've gone one step further and created a format that can be read online or used to create a printed version of the same article.