[Grondie]

Hey Everybody,

I recently landed a Art Director position at a major LA marketing firm. Much of the work I do here involves presentation graphics for sales pitches.

Here's the problem: The pitches have always been made in PowerPoint, and as you all know, there's plenty of limitations there. And of course, graphics are being produced in Adobe CS, so there's not much flexibility when it comes to what we can achieve in our presentations, while still maintaining a good look and feel.

Since the information in these presentations change on a daily basis, all documents must remain flexible enough to be changed at the very last minute, and the delivered product must remain stable on multiple platforms.

SO - I'm sure there's thousands of businesses that are in the same position, where the Adobe and Microsoft Office world are at odds with each other. I could produce the entire presentations myself using Adobe CS, but the staff couldn't do edits. I could provide graphics for import into PP, but then the type looks sub-par, and I can't create compelling layouts.

Does anybody have any suggestions or solutions? Right now I'm just waving the white flag and providing better background props for what are some very dull looking PP documents.

- Josh

[gray]

pdf presentation, straight from photoshop

[Grondie]

Hi Gray.

That wouldn't work for the account people since they need to edit text at will. Any fonts I use will be "baked in", and most of them don't have Photoshop installed on their machines.

[gray]

ah ok sorry didnt see that bit

it is possible to get nice looking things from powerpoint though, ive done it. its not something i want to remember though

[Grondie]

I'm crossing my fingers that Adobe will come up with the unified field theory for media sooner than later. Since they've aquired Macromedia perhaps we'll see the day soon where presentation graphics will be extensible for print, web and everything in-between.

In any case, I'm dying to come up with a process that works, because we'll be generating big-ticket presentations on pretty much a weekly basis. If I need to deal with PP then so be it, I just want to find the best balance with the tools we have available.

[Scott]

the latest adobe acrobat professional allows you to edit the pdfs...

open any pdf within it and you should be able to edit it, specially text.

had to do it for my assignment at uni, the servers were down and all i had was my pdf left, realised there was a typing error.....opened it up and edited...boom print ...sorted

as for the fonts just package them together with the file etc.

[Grondie]

Hi BlueSteel,

Hmmmm.... Interesting! So basically, we're talking about having Acrobat Pro 7.0 running on all the computers that would be editing the document? And I wouldn't have to worry about font issues? Almost sounds too good to be true.

I have AP6.0 running on my Mac. Must it be V7.0?

[Grondie]

One more thing. We often need to insert video into our presentations, which is something that has also married our process to PP. Does Acrobat7.0 handle Video?

[Scott]

don't know about AP6 i've only tried it with version 7. Test it out? create a random pdf with some text in, try to edit it using version 6 ?

acrobat is just for screen viewing and print based work, non video another words. - as far as i know that is

[jase1000]

Met a guy who works for Nike in the States and they were producing some very sleek presentations in PP. Made me look at PP in a whole different way after I saw what they were doing with it.

[pgo]

You can do some nice stuff with PP. It's just a pain in the ass.

[mike_m]

this: http://www.stuffandnonsense.co.uk/ar...on_slides.html may help you

Eric Meyer's remarkable s5 (Simple Standards-Based Slide Show System)