I have a few projects to turn into special reports or even books. I want these documents:
- to look good
- to include clickable links which work in both Acrobat and Mac OS X preview
- to be navigatable from the table of contents and/or index
The only PDF I’ve ever owned which got all of these things right (apart from a couple of manuals from Apple for high end programs like Final Cut Pro – if Apple couldn’t get it right for a $1000 application there’d be no hope) – is Aaron Wall’s SeoBook.
SEOBook is the best selling and best book on SEO. What’s great about SEOBook is that is based on real world experience and Aaron has no particular axe to grind in favour of any single SEO technique. A lot of the other books about SEO are written by either programmers or people selling SEO software or link building networks.
The other good thing about SEOBook are the attractive green graphics and professional appearance of the document.
Not only does Aaron’s SEOBook look great bit it is fully navigable. Aaron has added a great index as well. SeoBook is basically the ideal PDF book.
So I turned to Aaron to get instruction on how to easily create such a great PDF document, by doing a search on his weblog at SEOBook.com.
I struck gold. An entire post devoted to the subject of PDF formatting
Unfortunately the sad truth is that Aaron went through hell – over 50 hours of work to get the internal navigation working after a reedit.
I’ve left Aaron a question on the entry. I hope he has a better solution now. I don’t have 50 hours to format documents. It looks like another task which needs to be outsourced before I even begin it.
It’s a pity as I would have really liked to be able to create good looking and properly indexed PDF’s quickly inhouse. Maybe Aaron has come up with a better solution in the meantime and will drop me a line.