Mass electronic document publishing (please feel free to suggest a better term) is still an emerging field that will take time to reach maturity with publishers using established well developed standards and users having a set of expectations. Meeting or exceeding these expectations would qualify as best practice. Since its emerging field (in my view at least) there is no such well defined set of expectations and thus everything I will say below is purely my opinion.
> Security - should I disable printing, copying, mdifying etc.?
> (Pros and cons to be weighed up here, surely)
I'd say definitely not to disable printing and copying to clipboard - all these "security" techniques are just annoying barriers to users of your document, some of whom may have paid for it and therefore fully expect to be able to quote from it easily or print it to read elsewhere. I am sometimes amazed how free documents will have these essential "document" feature disabled, often without any good reason at all.
A lot of people will certainly disagree but it should be appreciated that anyone can take screenshot from your document and then apply OCR (Optical Character Recognition)to it , not even speaking of well known tools that break very weak PDF encryption.
> Byteserving - allowing my user to download the first page and
> read that while the rest downloads.
This might be useful as currently all or almost all PDFs have to be fully downloaded before they can be viewed, thus anything that can improve in this area could be of big benefit - I'd be careful to ensure backwards compatibility though.
> Fonts - how to ensure my nicely typeset text doesn't turn nasty.
I'd stick to most standard fonts used by everyone.
> Navigation - booksmarks, contents, internal links, links out of
> the PDF to other things, or links from hte outside world to a
> particular place in the PDF.
I'd suggest to ensure that you use unique linking that is trackable - this could provide invaluable information on how your document is actually used.
What's good practice for downloadable PDFs to be read on screen?, ChrisBaker, 10 Mar 11:24 How familiar is this: You download a PDF file, and wait ages to see the high-resolution picture on the cover. Having at last got the whole file, you find you have a big document wi ...
What's good practice for downloadable PDFs to be read on screen?, Alex Chudnovsky, 10 Mar 12:43 Mass electronic document publishing (please feel free to suggest a better term) is still an emerging field that will take time to reach maturity with publishers using established w ...
What's good practice for downloadable PDFs to be read on screen?, carolinejarrett, 17 Mar 15:24 There are also some accessibility issues in PDFs, unless you take care to make sure they are accessible from the start.
A good resource on PDF: www.planetpdf.com
for example, ...
What's good practice for downloadable PDFs to be read on screen?, ChrisBaker, 10 Mar 11:24
