Lesson 8: The Tools of the Trade
Generating paper documentation
Once you've finished writing your book you still need to get them to your customers. Books can be distributed as traditional paper books or in various electronic formats, most notably in either PDF or HTML. Since your book exists only in FrameMaker at this stage, you'll need to convert it to these other formats.
Paper books are generally sent to a professional printer for mass production and binding. Almost all printers request high-quality PDF files from writers. You can use a full version of Adobe Acrobat (as opposed to the more common Adobe Acrobat Reader) to create PDF files from FrameMaker. Adobe makes this conversion very easy - as simple as selecting a new printer and printing the file with the "Save as File" option checked (this can also be done using "Save as PDF" although in some cases this doesn't work as well).
However, most printers require certain settings to be used while generating the PDF files. You'll need to check with your printer and get a list of settings they want you to use - each printer varies slightly. These settings can be changed in the Adobe Acrobat Distiller portion of Acrobat. Once you've done this, creating PDF files for printing returns to the simple process of printing the Frame file.
