General issues arising from on-line distribution
Access and compatibility
You need to ensure that your intended readers will be able to download the material easily, whether to their own computers or to the classroom computers. Since some people still connect to the network over dial-up lines you need to ensure that the files are not too large. For instance, it might be worth finding out whether any of your students are any modem users -- perhaps they are 'distance learners', or otherwise remotely located during Reading Week; if you establish that there are no modem users in a particular group, you have eliminated one uncertainty. If it is still necessary you should put a smaller file on-line for modem users, perhaps by removing or reducing the quality of some of the images.
Once downloaded, the file must be readable on the computer. You cannot assume that students will have Microsoft Office on their own computers, and so Word, Excel and PowerPoint files should only be distributed once you have established that everyone in a class can handle them on their own computer, or that they all have access to a computer classroom. There is also the issue of compatibility across versions. Many members of staff have Microsoft Office 2003, whereas the computer classrooms are still using Office 2000. Although documents created with later versions of the Office applications are generally readable with Office 2000, features introduced in the later versions will not work if the document is opened with Office 2000. This can particularly affect PowerPoint.
Because of these compatibility issues, many authors convert their Office documents into Portable Document Format (PDF). Any computer user with a web browser either has, or can easily obtain, a copy of the Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is free software for reading and printing PDF files. Although there are free viewer programs for the Microsoft Office applications, they are less easily available than the Acrobat Reader.
Conversion to PDF is a solution to most distribution and access problems, but it does not solve all the problems that arise when printing documents. See the section on creating PDF files for further information and advice.
Printing problems
Anyone who has produced word-processed documents of any complexity will know that printing is the weak link in the production chain. When you print a document on a computer other than the one that was used to produce the document you can expect to encounter problems.
For example, your chosen fonts may not be available. This may result in nothing worse than the print-out using a different font, but it may also result in special characters (such as the Euro sign or accented characters) not appearing correctly, and in some cases it may simply cause the document not to print at all.
When you distribute a document over the web, you are passing it not to one different computer, but to many, and the chance that they are all configured in the same way as yours is very small.
In particular, there may be particular issues relating to printing in PC classrooms that cause problems for students.
