The CD-ROM is especially useful when large amounts of information need to be distributed. They are an effective means of reducing both mailing costs and printing costs. Typical uses would be for large catalogs, instruction manuals, policy manuals, and technical information and drawings.

In the past few years, Terrapin Design has been offering CDs authored using Adobe Acrobat. While not usually thought of as an authoring program, our choice to use Acrobat is based on what we feel are some distinct advantages.

First, Acrobat is a "vector" based program. This offers some distinct advantages over its raster based counterparts: 1- type and some images can be scaled up or down without losing their crisp appearance; 2- vector files take up less space than raster files- more information can be put on a single disk; 3- vector images tend to load and run faster than raster images.

Second, Acrobat offers a variety of interfaces. You can use the built-in capabilities of Acrobat's navigation features, or choose a completely custom-designed interface depending on your needs, tastes, or budget.

Third, Acrobat has a number of interactive and multimedia capabilities available, including video cllips, audio clips, and window transitions. Acrobat can accomdate direct links from the CD to a web site or a page within a website, as well as transmit forms filled out while viewing the CD.

Fourth, Acrobat can open files created in other programs, allowing you to create libraries of documents without reformatting or converting them.

Finally, since just about any document can be converted to pdf, Acrobat allows you to draw extensively from existing computer documents. This reduces the time and cost of producing a CD.

Whether your CD is a stand-alone presentation or part of a sytem integrated with print and web sites, Terrapin Design can design and produce a CD that fits your needs and your budget.