Designing the next Dragonball Z processor is complicated enough without having to wade through reams of engineering change documents riddled with format changes and conflicting font sets.

So say the engineers at Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector (SPS), a unit of the large semiconductor and processor manufacturer. The group was fed up with passing FrameMaker files back and forth between engineering groups in the Far East and Austin, Texas, and dealing with the resulting formatting and font conflicts as the various engineers made updates and changes.

“With DragonBall, our team is on the sixth generation of the product,” says Dave Huss, who is responsible for all DragonBall documentation at the company. “For our newest MX1 line alone, we have over 2,000 pages of documentation. Add to this mix several different time zones and it’s clear we needed a more organized, deliberate approach.”

Enter Adobe Acrobat. At Huff’s suggestion, the engineers tried it and soon found that Acrobat Exchange made their job much easier. “With Acrobat 5.5, they could go in there and make changes directly to the PDF file without opening it or redistilling it,” Huss says. And all of the original formatting remains intact, saving untold amounts of time and frustration. Once the review process is finished, the technical documentation team simply corrects the source file, which remains intact on a server in Austin.

Using Acrobat, every documentation review cycle gets shaved “by at least a couple of days,” Huss says. “We save one day out of the week for this reason alone – 10% of the project.”