Since color printing costs can be prohibitive, we're moving forward with our newsletter project with the plan to publish it electronically and share it via e-mail a common practice with organizations today. However, there is a caveat to designing documents for electronic distribution in Pages.
Documents are shared by exporting them to PDF (Portable Document Format). The PDF file format is a wonderful format for sharing documents between different computers and platforms. As developed by Adobe Systems, PDFs should provide a near perfect replication of the original source file preserving the appearance of text and graphics. Unfortunately for us, Apple made the decision to violate the spirit of the format by saving Mac OS X-specific rendering instructions in the PDF files exported from Pages. This departure from the format results in two distinct and major hindrances for publishing our newsletter in the PDF format from Pages. First, only readers viewing the PDF in the Mac OS X Preview application will be able to see any of the drop shadows we included throughout our design they do not appear when viewed in the Adobe PDF reader. Second, the text in our newsletter, which renders beautifully in the Preview application, looks heavy and distorted in the Adobe reader. Hopefully, Apple will rethink this decision in future versions of Pages. Until then, you should consider if developing your newsletter in Pages for electronic distribution is the right thing for your organization. If it is then design the newsletter with this caveat in mind.
