We recently changed to our e-newsletters and now send them as links to an online pdf document.
The reasons we made this change include:
- creative freedom in designing the e-news.
- designing for print – news can be viewed online or printed and shared with family / friends.
- many people view email with images off – which takes away some of the benefit of publishing a colourful html enewsetter which are time consuming to produce
This is what our recent email newsletter looked like:
One email recipient noted that they could not view pdf documents. This prompted us to search for a way to keep our creative design ideas alive, but make viewing a pdf document universally available, regardless of the computer settings and programs of our e-news recipients.
This week, I discovered 3 free new tools for making documents viewable in a browser online:
- Vuzit,
- Cloudprint and
- Scribd
PDF documents and others become viewable online in a browser by linking to them or embedding the documents in your Web site or blog.
A demo of Scribd follows:
With Scribd, documents can be uploaded from your computer or a url:
and it takes seconds to embed the document in your blog.
The end result is a nice looking multipage e-newsletter that folks can read in a browser without leaving 10% of folks without pdf viewing capability out in the cold.
At Northern Edge Algonquin, we host numerous pdf documents (8.5 by 11 inch) as viewable, printable, search engine indexable documents. Our next step is to make these online pdf documents universally available using one or more of these free tools.
