Adobe Acrobat™ was one of the original formats available for so-called 'portable documents,' files which contain both text and detailed formatting information, including page size, fonts and typographical effects. The Adobe Acrobat™ viewer is still available free for the downloading time at many sites on the WEB, and many WEB browsers can be configured to launch it or an embedded applet automatically.
I collected manyof my early poems into a collection that was intended to be more inclusive than critical. Notes and commentary accompany the poems, which are presented more-or-less chronologically.
The format reflects the history of my obsessions, in a way. I began writing mostly on a typewriter, an old Olympia manual I got as a High School graduation present. My first 'collections' were all typescript. As time went on I computerized my typing and writing. The XyWrite III version of 'Collected Poems' I don't think exists any more, but the output formatting was based on single-sided, 8½X11 sheets, like a typescript. XyWrite had a rather rich set of footnoting features, however, and I used them all.
XyWrite for Windows, as baulky and buggy a program that ever existed, did allow me to use fancier fonts, and Windows™ printer drivers, including Adobe's PDF Writer. I added a second volume, used a different fonts for it, and formatted it for facing pages, a binding gutter, and all that good stuff. It never really worked very well.
I maintain the current version by running Windows 98 inside a VMWare virtual machine, and running XyWrite inside of that. The formatting has reverted to single pages, single-sided, and the sheet size has shrunk down to B5, which fits the poems better. The first three volumes contain what was in the original collection, volume IV is the 'second' volume, and volume V is my little joke. Almost everything worthwhile written after these volumes end has been published here on the web site as a 'Poem of the Month.'
The plan is to transfer all this into Note Bene (a direct descendant of XyWrite which is also called 'The Scholar's Workbench') but that would involve translating the old two-byte special characters from XyWrite into the current Nota Bene character set, and that's too much like work...
Poetry By The Page is the name I have used since the mid-1970's for occasional printed broadsheets I have issued, mostly of my own poetry. Until the 1990's, these sheets were always entirely hand set in foundry type, and hand-printed on a 6" X 10" hand press. Lately, I have been using computer software to do page layout, printing prototype pages on laser printers, and using offset or even xerographic reproduction for bulk copies.
PBTP was generally distributed through my membership in the American Amateur Press Association's monthly 'bundle' of members' publications. The AAPA membership has lately grown a little wary of electronic typesetting, and in the course of the debate I decided that future issues of PPTP will either be all hand work, or all digital. The digital pieces will not be printed 'on paper' but instead will be distributed as portable electronic documents.
FAB&PP was the name I originally used (sometimes as FABB&PP) for pamphlets of prose, poetry and opinion. As with the Poetry by the Page series, many recent issues have been prepared digitally. I have converted some of my digitally-prepared favorites into Adobe Acromat(tm) format for publication here.
Acrobat provides the publisher/designer with some interesting
possibilities, including odd page sizes and effects that would be difficult or
expensive to accomplish with physical pages. On the other hand, Acrobat
documents aren't always super high resolution, they don't print out very well,
and even their on-screen resolution is problematic. If you view the 'whole
page' the appearance of the material is often 'dithered' in appearance because
of the limitations in pixel-per-inch screen resolutions. On the other hand,
while the type 'zooms' beautifully, you can't really read material very well
when the page is at a 400% zoom ratio. In any case, many of the same thoughts I
have expressed about viewing text on computer
screens applies to Acrobat documents.
Nevertheless, There is some material which is naturally better suited to the medium than others. It's appropriate, for example, that the Adobe Acrobat sampler CDROM includes the complete sonnets of William Shakespeare in a wholly original digital format. So not that I compare myself to Shakespeare, but I've produced these booklets using material which I hope is well suited to the format.