Adobe normally does a fine job supplying a paper manual for its products, but Adobe is also very consistent for only supplying a PDF as its manual for the Acrobat program.

Adobe's PDF manual on PDF creation is actually not too bad. But while I can appreciate a PDF manual with most anyone, until a company provides me with a 2nd monitor to read the manual while looking at the program, I want a paper manual. So until Adobe provides either a 2nd monitor or changes their policy of providing only a PDF manual with Acrobat, we users must either print out the PDF manual, or are dependant upon 3rd party books to fill the "paper void."

Fortunately "Real World with Adobe PDF Acrobat 5" is a very good book. Be advised though that this book is very publishing-centric with it's primary emphasis on getting your electronic document to a prepress operation. It's really very interesting how PDFs have developed an interesting niche for resolving problems of fonts, color, and other areas of setup confusion when transferring your document from your computer and your program to a prepress operation. By selecting the proper Acrobat settings, much of these potential problems are (potentially) easily resolved.

Anita Dennis starts the book by providing not only a breakdown of the many ways that PDFs are used, but also a side interesting history of the Acrobat program. But in Chapter 2, Anita goes full bore into how to use the settings in Acrobat for specific programs for prepress preparation. Not only covering the various Adobe products (Illustrator, Photoshop, FrameMaker, etc.), the book also covers FreeHand, QuarkXPress, CorelDraw, and MS Office. Albeit in a somewhat dry fashion, all the information for setting up the prepress selections are presented.

I found the most interesting chapter in the book was the 3rd, the one on "The Lowdown on Distilling." The Acrobat Distiller is probably one of the more enigmatic programs ever to land on a computer. Distiller, if you don't know, is the heart (or brains rather) of actual PDF creation. One uses Acrobat to read PDFs, turn them into forms, apply annotations, alter them, and many other activities. However, it's the Distiller that does the actual PDF creation. If you have neither seen nor dealt with the Distiller, when started, it opens ready to "do" something, but with no real way to see how or what one is to "do" with it (for example, there is no "Open" option in the File menu). However, as in the program for creating PDFs, subtle changes in its settings can make a big difference in how effective your PDF will be for (specifically) screen viewing, printing, eBook creation, or fast web viewing.

In Chapter 4, Anita changes direction a bit to discuss the collaborating and proofing features within Acrobat, but in Chapter 5 she's back at the prepress door detailing the various trapping features of Acrobat. In Chapter 6 workflows and the interactivities of PJTF, JDF, CIP3, PPML/VDX and other (what she calls) alphabet soup. Finally, in Chapter 7 she discusses what the various attributes of PDF documents in an electronic world bring to the user.

While I found the information in this book superb, I found its layout rather confusing. It's not written in a general user-centric vision of the program, but rather a prepress-centric vision. The digressions to other subjects (collaboration, proofing, electronic documents, and issues of the Distiller that don't have to directly deal with prepress) almost seem as if they are presented as afterthoughts (although they are very well written).

In short, this is a very good book with much detailed information on how to use Adobe Acrobat. Even if you try and deal with the supplied PDF, you will find the information in "Real World PDF with Adobe Acrobat" lives up to the book's Real World series namesake: It's not how to use Acrobat, but how to use Acrobat in the real world.

Now, we are left to sit and wait for Adobe to Carbonize Distiller so we can use it in OS X like we finally can with the Acrobat program (which was Carbonized in update 5.0.5).

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