Viewing Your Trip Strategy Guide™
Version 1 - March 2005
Everybody wants the latest and greatest hardware...
The reality is, however that most of us have to make do with what we have at the current moment. Modern computers today have come a long way from even just a few years ago in terms of graphics, memory, and processing power. Even so, a majority of computer users have systems at least several years old which poses limitations for those developing content for the Internet and for on-screen display. At EZ Outdoor Systems we have to do both. We have created this guide to help provide a great viewing and using experience for our Trip Strategy Guides, regardless of your computer’s current hardware configuration.
As you found out when you downloaded your guide, Trip Strategy Guides™ are a relatively large in file size compared to a typical Microsoft Word document or general PDF documents you might find on the web. There is a concrete reason behind this other than gratuitous file bloat, which we do try to avoid at all costs. The high-resolution maps and images found within the document require a certain minimum publishing resolution in order to retain readability and appearance for on-screen viewing. That being said there will be those with older computers who find that the documents may at times be slow in processing, navigation and paging. This help document is designed to help all users adjust their Acrobat Reader and System settings to minimize frustration and maximize productivity; which is really what we are all about in the first place.
An Important Note Before Beginning: Because of the encryption method used in our Trip Strategy Guides to ensure copyright protection, when adjusting display settings within Adobe Reader, you must never save changes made to the document with those settings; even if prompted to do so. Doing so will render the file unreadable and unrecoverable, resulting in an unnecessary waste of one of your three downloads. Adobe® Reader® display settings can be adjusted through the Preferences panel and will remain changed for all documents unless you choose to change them back.
Overview
Despite being free, Adobe® Reader® is a very robust program with many built in accessiblity features and options that can be modified to suite any users tastes and preferences. With it’s support for high resolution images, graphics, and font embedding, it allows readers to view documents and publications exactly as the author intended. This is unlike conventional HTML pages you might view on the internet, which are limited by the fonts and browser the viewer has on their system. In addition, PDF files are natively compressed which speeds up download times and bandwith requirements for consumers. When stored on your hard drive, this equates to faster opening and paging than an uncompressed document of similar size. For the purposes of this guide, we will assume you have Adobe® Reader® Version 5 or higher on your system. Adobe has recently released Version 7 of their Reader® which offers additional enhancements over it’s predecessors. While current versions of our Trip Strategy Guides™ are published with compatibility for Reader® 5 and higher, we intend to improve the content for future versions to improve interactivity and ease of use. As we improve our product it may be necessary for our customers to use the newest version of the Adobe® Reader® software in order to use such features. Regardless we recommend at least version 6.0 or higher on your system.
For starters, most of the controls to adjust the viewing preferences of Adobe® Reader® can be adjusted by selecting Edit>Preferences (right). Within the menu this displays you can adjust your general preferences for the Reader® software as well as adjust the properties of the current document you are viewing. Reader® 6, for example has 17 different panels within the Preferences dialog to adjust various settings. Only three of these panels are relevant to the purposes of this guide. The Page Display and the Smoothing tabs provide the primary controls for adjusting your viewing preferences while the Reading panel is applicable for those with visual disabilities who wish to make use of screen reader technology. The screen images in this document are produced using Adobe® Reader® 6. Reader® 7 includes some additional features and modifies the layout slightly. None of these changes are significant for our purposes at this time. Let’s first start with the Smoothing panel as this controls the display of text within the document.
Text Display
Text is the vehicle in which the information in our Trip Strategy Guides™ is communicated to you the customer. The maps and graphics supplement this information, but with some of the documents nearing 50 pages in length, users will want to ensure the settings for text in Adobe Reader are just right in order to avoid screen fatigue and the frustration that accompanies straining your eyes to read unclear text. Feel free to play around with the different settings in this panel see what best fits your personal preferences.
The first line on the smoothing panel is the most important. We recommend leaving all three checked if possible, however if you are experiencing severe slowness or delays within your viewing of the document, you may elect to deselect one or all of them. Doing so produces a thinner, jagged text that most feel is unattractive, but may render more legibly for some. The check box on the second row is for the option to use Cool Type type feature. Depending on your monitor, you may or may not see a significant difference from selecting this option. We find that it does provide some additional smoothing and contrast effects for making text clearer. Choose the text example with the the appearance that suits you best and Reader will apply the changes to your document.
Incidentally, if you are a Windows XP user and are not familiar with Microsoft’s Clear Type feature, it provides a similar text enhancement for your entire computer. You can turn this feature on by right-clicking anywhere on your desktop, selecting Properties and clicking the Effects button under the Appearance tab. Select Clear Type as your method for smoothing edge of screen text and apply the settings. While individual preferences vary, we have found that after you get used to the new look of the text on your computer, reverting to standard computer text seems ugly by comparison.
Page Display
Once we’ve adjusted the text to suit our preferences, it’s time to adjust the graphics. Computer images are measured in quality by the number of pixels per inch in the graphic. While a higher number of pixels per inch produces clear, crisp images, a delicate balance has to be struck between the appearance of the document versus the ability for the average customer to be able to download the documents in a reasonable amount of time. Higher resolution images also take up more memory and processing resources(see Hardware) and can slow down older computers to the point of frustration. To give an example of this, many of the map images we create for our Trip Strategy Guides™ have resolutions as high as 500 pixels per inch. When we convert the document from our publishing software to a PDF format, we downsize the images to around 200 pixels per inch. While this introduces a degree of distortion into the image in the PDF, it makes a dramatic difference in file size. We have produced full-quality PDFs that exceeded 35MB for example. Downsizing allows us to keep the file size between 5-10 MB which, if not ideal, is at least reasonable for most. By using the Display options panel in Reader® users can reduce the quality of the document even further to free up system resources.
The first option you can select within the Page display tab is whether or not to display large images. Doing so, however will show almost every image within a typical Trip Strategy Guide™ as grey box. Since the document uses transparency and background images, this can increase the difficulty in reading the document. The boxes for tranparency grid, displaying the page to the edge and logical page numbers are up to the users individual preference. They provide no performance enhancements either way.
The check box for “display greek text below...” can be a handy setting for those experiencing performance issues, however. What this setting does is allow the user to refuse to render text below a certain size. Lets say for example you chose to “greek” the text below 15 pixels. By zooming out of the document to 60 percent of original size, you would suddenly notice all of the body text in the document has turned into grey boxes. What is left visible are the document and section headers. Paging down through the document becomes much faster as your computer does not have to process text, font, and smoothing of each character in the document. It only needs to do so for the text above the size you have specified. You can quickly page down to the section header or page tab in the document you wish to view and then zoom in to reveal the text.
The next box offers you the opportunity to specify a custom resolution for your document. Depending on your screen size this can make a dramatic difference in the quality of the images in your document. The first thing you will notice when you change this setting to a smaller value is that your document becomes smaller. If you reduce by 50 percent, you will now have to zoom the document to 200% to acheive the same zoom as was previously 100%. The images, however will be at lower resolutions, which can affect the legibility of the maps in the document. You will have to play with this setting to find the right balance between size and legibility. The magnification options are entirely up to the users preference and have no impact on file size.
These two preference options within Reader® provide you with invaluable options to help solve simple troubleshooting issues. They also allow you to customize the document for the way you prefer to view it. Regarding other accessibility options, our PDF files are automatically generated with compatibility for those with screen readers. Should you have any additional special needs we might accommodate in the viewing and reading of our products, please feel free to contact us at support@ezoutdoorsys.com.
System Hardware
Lets talk computer hardware for a moment. It is important to have a working knowledge of how your computer processes files in order to understand what can and cannot be adjusted to suit your viewing preferences(or even which upgrades for your computer might provide the best value for your dollar should you feel the need to do so). Every computer made in the last 10 years contains each of the following: a computing processor, RAM memory, a graphics processing unit(GPU), and one or more hard drives. Each of these has very different functions in producing the images you see on your screen.
If you are the type who may have found your eyes rolling into the back of your head at the mere mention of the word “processor,” have faith. We’ll keep the technical-speak to a minimum. For the purposes of the Trip Strategy Guides™ we at EZ Outdoor Systems provide, the specs of your main processor are irrelevant other than that it meets the minimum requirements for Adobe’s Reader software. On the other hand, your GPU, RAM and Hard Drive play a critical role in the display of our content and any other for that matter. In stationary content such as our Trip Strategy the primary enchancement the GPU provides is your monitor’s resolution. Many computers are set up out-of-the-box with 800X600 pixels for the monitor resolution. Those who leave the system default settings in place many times never know what they are missing. Frequently users adjust the monitor resolutions upward only to find that the screen icons appear too small to view comfortably. These can be adjusted in size, however, to suit your preferences.
The primary benefit of selecting the highest resolution available is that by increasing the number of pixels on your screen, you decrease the size of the pixels used to display images and text. The more pixels contained within a graphic or letter on your screen, the clearer and smoother that projected image or text is. Today, depending on your GPU and type of monitor, extremly high resolutions are available in even the most basic computer packages.
Memory is the next component which plays a vital role in the display experience of any computer user. Many times people who wish to upgrade their computers choose memory as the first option and for very good reason. Since all of the background processes running in your computer use a portion of that memory to run, only that which is left over is available to whichever current application you want to open. If the needs of the application exceeds the available memory, your computer begins to “borrow” space from the hard drive to perform the task at hand. Once that begins to happen, everything starts to slow down.
Hard drives are painfully slow compared to processors and memory. A very fast hard drive might have an average access time of a few milliseconds, which is over a thousand times slower than the microsecond access times typical of your memory. Although hard disks can retrieve data faster once it is found, they are effectively subsystems of the computer that are thousands of times slower than the processor or memory. Fortunately today, hard drives and memory and even aftermarket graphics cards are relatively inexpensive. For those with outdated hardware wishing to improve their overall computing experience, the above information may prove usefull in helping you select which upgrades can give you the most bang for your buck, depending on how you wish to use your computer.
An important note on your system resources: Unfortunately today the experience of the World Wide Web has been tainted with the presence of spyware, malware, and viruses. Users who have adequate system resources, but still find their computers are unreasonably slow may very well have one or all of these unpleasant inhabitants on their system. At EZ Outdoor Systems we quite simply loathe these destructive computer parasites and are adamant about ensuring that our users understand how to combat and prevent them. An estimated 90% of computers today are infected. While detection and removal of these are outside of the scope of this document, we would recommend that all users of our products practices safe computing with, at the very minimum, appropriate Anti-Virus Software, trusted Spyware Detection and Removal Software, and a Software Firewall. If you believe you may be in fected and are lacking some or all of these things, you can use the following links to obtain software that is freely available for private use in order to help clean your system( Spybot, Adaware, AVG, Microsoft, Zone Alarm). Important: If your system is redirected to a different site or you receive a “cannot connect to server” error, you are almost certainly infected. You will need to use another computer to download these programs in order to remove the infection. EZ Outdoor Systems is not affiliated and does not endorse the parties linked to in this document. These links are provided as an informational service to our customers only. As such, we should not be held liable for damage to your system or files which might occur by using products and software from these links. For more information about these topics, this site by David Piscitello has an excellent collection of information and articles on all manner of computer security related issues.