Intranet Journal: A PDF Primer (Part I)

P.G.Daly's Intranet Talk
A PDF Primer (Part I)

By P.G.Daly

By now, if you’ve used the web, you’ve encountered a PDF file.For those who are peeking out from under a rock and don’t know what a PDF is, it is the acronym for Adobe’s Portable Document Format file. What I learned in my last job is that many people aren’t sure when is the best time to use a PDF versus an HTML file versus some native application file for given web content.In addition, people aren’t always sure how to create them and some people wouldn’t know how to view them if the tech support staff didn’t already configure their computer properly so it “just happened” in the background. In this 2 article series, I hope to give you some rules of thumb for when to use PDFs versus other types of files as well as a quick primer of the different ways available to create PDFs and when to use what.

These days PDFs are even more prevalent than even just a few years ago.They have become the de facto standard for official looking documents and forms. A prime example is the IRS site. All the tax forms are available for download and PDF format is one of your options. So, why have they become so popular, a standard if you will? Several reasons in my opinion:

They are the best way to put a document on the web that needs to “look a certain way” when it is printed. That is, maintain its look and feel formatting wise.
Cross-platform availability of a free viewing application (that is also quite frankly very stable and doesn’t wreak havoc on the browser or the user’s system’s resources).
Easy to create from almost any native application in existence.
Very flexible in the sense that you can create Table of Contents (a.k.a. “Bookmarks”) and other internal links within the file to the point of creating a pretty complex file and even a pseudo slide show.
Reasonable file size if you create it properly (depending on how you create the PDF, you can also end up with a behemoth, but more on that later).

So now you know some of the reasons why they are so widely used; however, you are probably still wondering to yourself, when is the right time to use a PDF rather than an HTML page or some other type of file? What are the general rules of thumb for this sort of thing?Well, let me try and answer that for you in an FAQ type format.

Q. What software do I need to view and print PDFs?

A. All you need is the freely available Acrobat Reader from Adobe on your machine and you are set to read PDFs whether they are on the web, on a personal or shared file system, or on portable media (CD, floppy, Zip Disk, etc.).

Q. What software do I need to create PDFs?

A. Adobe Acrobat. The Acrobat Reader is free, but Adobe Acrobat is not. Adobe Acrobat consists of Adobe Acrobat, Distiller, and Adobe Capture.You can learn all the gory details at Adobe’s website.

Q. What should I use if I need my content to appear and print with the layout, graphics, links, and formatting intact?

A. As you probably already know, HTML does not provide for a high degree of layout control and translates even worse to the printer.Therefore, for any content or document that you want to appear and print in a predefined format, use a PDF.Examples of this include forms, contracts and agreements, applications, and certain types of manuals to name a few.

Q. I need to share documents from my native Windows applications (read-only) with other users on MAC and UNIX systems.

A. It is so easy to create a PDF from an Office application and ship it off to a MAC user who can then actually open and read it without any problems it should be sinful. Remember the P?It stands for Portable, and it truly is. Perhaps Adobe did such a good job with this part of the equation because of their years of experience with MAC based graphics software.

Q. What if I don’t know HTML and I really just want to post my documents to the website quickly and don’t want to count on users having the same applications as me (not to mention compatible versions)?

A. Once again, this is a prime candidate for a PDF file.For most documents that are not too intense with graphics or complicated layouts, it takes maybe 2 mouse clicks and you can have a PDF file that looks good and is a nice small file size.

Q. What is the best way to circulate documents for review and preserve the original version from changes?

A. With PDFs you can have others annotate comments on your document by attaching what amounts to a “sticky note” to your original version.Keep in mind that this requires users who you want to annotate to have Acrobat as well.

Q. How can I create some formal looking interactive business forms on the web?

A. Acrobat allows you to create interactive business forms that preserve the look and feel of the paper forms. These forms can be linked to a database as well as be dynamically generated depending on the data that is input.

I hope this answers your questions and gives you a good feel for why you’d want to use PDFs and well as a general rule of thumb as to when you’d want to use them. Hopefully, your next question is how can I learn to create PDFs without having to read some manual or go to some class? In Part II of this article, I will walk you through the most common ways of creating PDFs and provide you with several step-by-step examples to get you up and running for the most common uses.