Envoy Plug-in for Netscape 2.0 -- Tumbleweed Software's Envoy plug-in viewer gives users the ability to view Novell's Envoy files from within the latest release of Netscape. Envoy documents can even be embedded within HTML documents and viewed with the plug-in module. Going a step beyond Envoy, the plug-in viewer gives users the capability to embed fonts, hyperlinks, indexes, and outlines in standard Envoy files. As with Adobe's Acrobat Amber Reader, you won't be able to create your own Envoy files with the viewer, but you will find an abundance of examples to check out on the 'net. Envoy itself is a portable document format (like Adobe Acrobat) designed for the electronic distribution and viewing of documents created by 'printing' document files with the Envoy driver. Envoy documents ensure visual fidelity to the original content, formatting, and graphics created within the authoring tools at a fraction of the original file size. As far as quality goes, Envoy presentations often exceed those of Adobe Acrobat but are still no match for well-designed HTML pages. However, when coupled with an HTML page, Envoy documents can add additional dimensions to the web that were not previously possible. Perhaps the best example of this is the ability to embed fully functioning toolbars with the files, giving authors New directions for perfecting their web sites. Still, documents viewed with Envoy tend to suffer from the same jagged, hard to read fonts that also plague Acrobat. As with Acrobat, the Envoy viewer does excel at showing massive presentations and complex tables, charts, graphs, and the like -- with its embedded toolbar, hyperlink, and indexing capabilities, Envoy files can often offer superior readability and manageability even over similar web documents. Overall, while HTML is typically a more attractive and more efficient use of paperless documentation, in the absence of an Internet connection, for massive documents, or as an aid in furthering the power and diversity of web documents, the Envoy viewer is indeed a very useful tool for the task at hand. Pros: Easy and free viewing or printing of Novell's Envoy files Cons: Doesn't look or function as well as HTML documents on the web New: Copy to clipboard, printing, font embedding, text search, zooming, more Version Reviewed: Release 3/22/96 Reviewer: Forrest Stroud Date of Review: 4/3/96 Reviewer: Forrest Stroud apps conference Main Menu