I love the smell of white paste glue in the morning!
CalDog said:
2. Most of our procedures are Microsoft Word documents, stapled on top of OEM or government documents. Scanning these into Adobe creates large files, often about 1MB.
Is that 1 MB figure for an entire multi-page document? Considering that a sheet of paper is scanned as a picture, that seems closer to the size I would expect for a single page.
I agree that scanning documents does make sizeable files, but all things are relative. The first computer hard drives I ever sold were 5 MB - that was huge in 1979. A few weeks ago I was buying a new external drive for my laptop and about the smallest I could find was 100 GB -- 20,000 times larger!
CalDog said:
3. Even with the large file size, I tested an Adobe in our laboratory management software program. I protected the document from editing, but when it's pulled up in our management program, the protection is disabled! I can't protect the server, because it needs to be accessed by multiple computers ... unless they can allow access, but not editing (that's a thought).
Wow! I have never heard of an application that could break and remove Adobe's file security all by itself! While we almost certainly use different lab software, I just checked a cal procedure in mine (logged in as a user instead of as an administrator) and the PDF file came up with the security, encryption, protections and digital signature all intact. If your application is breaking the security, that tells me it is probably manipulating all files somehow instead of just storing them.
That makes me wonder ... what
else it it doing that we can't see?
- What version of Acrobat are you using? (I am most familiar with versions 5 and 6 but I have used older ones as well.)
- How are you turning the protection on? (I go from Acrobat's FILE menu, choose DOCUMENT SECURITY, and then select the security options in the dialog box. After saving it that way, then I put a digital signature on it just to be extra sure.)
On a server, a standard permissions setting is read-only. It is also routine for permissions to be managed by user groups. For example, people in the USER group would have read only access; people in the ADMINISTRATOR group can do anything, and people in the GUEST group can't even see the directory.
CalDog said:
4. I'd just archive hard copies, but many of the second-source procedures we use are updated. For example, we'll receive half-a-dozen replacement pages. So I can't archive the whole document, only the replaced pages! And then a few months later some different pages will be updated.
I agree that can be a problem, and one even the Governemnt has trouble with. Many of the documents I get from the
DAPS ASSIST web site consist of the base document and then several updates, all in separate PDF files. But also in many cases they merge the document for you -- I think the key is if all of the source documents are in electronic format. They do have a limited number of "historical" copies online as well, but not as many as some would like. In that respect, the
GIDEP database for calibration and reliability information is better -- they have a lot of old as well as current versions.
I have not bothered to move our old paper documents out of the filing cabinets. Most of them are old test and measurement equipment manuals that the manufacturers do not update. Others are aircraft manufacturer drawings, and for those we can always get the latest version from their online database. In each case they will slowly disappear as the equipment does. I also fairly often check the web sites of the major test equipment manufacturers to find updated manuals for models in out workload and download any new ones. (Many are in electronic format now.) I am also slowly re-writnig calibration procedures in electronic form.
IF a document
and its revised pages are both in PDF documents,
and they are
not protected (or you can turn it off) then you can actually merge the changed pages yourself. In the Acrobat DOCUMENT menu there are choices to insert, delete, merge and replace pages between documents. I would suggest:
- Make a new copy that will contain the changes, and a new copy of the changes. Close the old copies. (Reason - to reduce the risk of accidentally doing something that can't be undone.)
- With the new copy and the new change document both open, use Acrobat to delete and old page and replace it with a changed page.
- Protect and save the changed copy as the new revision. (At that point you will have files of the new version and the previous version, and two copies of the change pages - one of which can be deleted.)
Very occasionally I do get flashbacks of hours spent cutting changed lines or paragraphs from the transmittal message and pasting them into the publications ... just goes to show that not everything in the Marines was fun.