Return Home

PDF Tips and Tricks
by Matt Sullivan

Matt Sullivan is the
training director for
GRAFIX Training, Inc.,
an Adobe-certified training provider
with offices in San Diego and Tustin.

Among his Adobe certifications are Acrobat, FrameMaker, FrameMaker+SGML, and Photoshop.

Direct questions on
technical issues to
matt@grafixtraining.com

Find previous "Tech Issues" columns at www.grafixtraining.com/
stc/stc.html.

Ask 10 different people to describe Adobe® Acrobat®, and you'll likely get 10 different answers. At its core, Acrobat is a delivery mechanism. It allows any application to create a file viewable on virtually any platform using the free Acrobat Reader® viewer. The file stores all the resources necessary for viewing and printing the file.

So, given the simplicity of Acrobat (or Portable Document Format [PDF]) file creation, why do you need to keep reading? Because Acrobat files should be tailored for your intended audience.

For an example of this document as a tailored PDF, see http://www.grafixtraining.com/stc/stc.html.

Many factors add to the usability of a PDF file. Among them are:

• Delivery Method. Will this be emailed, posted on the Web, or delivered on CD? See "Compression" below.
• Final Purpose. Will this be viewed on-screen, laser printed, or sent to a commercial printer? See "Compression" below.
• Relevance. Is this document related to other PDFs?
  See "Indexing" below.
• Linking. Are there other PDF or Web files that have to be accessed from this file? See "Links and Bookmarks" below.

Creating a PDF
To create a PDF, you need the Acrobat Distiller application (a part of the ~$225 Acrobat suite) installed. Then you use either the File|Save As|PDF or File|Print|Acrobat Distiller commands.

MS Office® products and Adobe FrameMaker® have some of the best Save As PDF options, giving you more options for retaining electronic links in your final PDF document.

These products also allow you to automatically create navigational structures in your PDF file on the basis of text flow as well as Paragraph Styles.

Defaults
Both creation methods allow a choice of default settings to help optimize file size and quality on the basis of your intended purpose. (These defaults range from Screen for online material to Press for commercial printing projects.)

To access these options for MS products, see the Acrobat|Change Conversion Settings menu item.

To access these options in Adobe products, see the PDF Setup options, typically under the File or Edit menus.

If you are using products that do not allow Save As PDF, you will print to the Acrobat Distiller printer driver. This driver allows you access to the compression settings discussed earlier by choosing the Properties button in the Print dialog box. Upon printing, a temporary PostScript file is sent to Acrobat Distiller and processed automatically using your selected settings.

Big tip: If you don't choose a setting, the default (usually Screen) will be used, resulting in a very compressed file.

Custom Job Options
If you need files with specific conversion settings, Acrobat allows you to create custom setting files if the four defaults are not enough.

Compression
Compression is the most common reason for custom settings. Under the Compression tab, you can specify both the maximum image resolution and the method for compressing images.

These settings affect your final PDF file size and quality more than any other factor.

Image resolution is fairly straightforward: 72 dpi is a typical maximum resolution for on-screen viewing; 300 is typical for any type of printing.

The actual compression checkbox allows a choice between lossless compression (which retains all file quality, typically ZIP or LZW formats) and lossy compression (which averages the color values of adjacent pixels, typically JPEG format).

The Automatic option will generally use the JPEG compression for color and grayscale images.

Fonts
Sometimes the typefaces on your machine don't agree with the Distiller and will show up as missing or garbled type in the final PDF document. Typically, these will be the ornate display faces that came on a disk with 3,000 other faces for $14.99. If you can't bear to part with that face, you can manually force Distiller to download it into your PDF file. Fortunately, this will not make your file appreciably larger.

Big tip: Stick with the four default settings unless you run into a big problem with printing or fonts.

Indexing
Acrobat has a full-text indexing function that allows your audience to quickly search for a word or file attribute across a collection of documents.

For a workgroup environment, this index could be on a common server and accessed by every machine in the workgroup.

If your PDFs are distributed or archived on CD, then the index can be supplied on the CD, and you can associate all files within the collection with the supplied index.

Big tip: Summary information is given a higher priority in the index than document text. Fill out the information under File|Document Properties|Summary.

Links and Bookmarks
Links are hotspots similar to those on Web pages. They can jump to a specific location, open a new file, or perform actions such as playing a sound. Bookmarks are links but stored in the Navigation Pane of the Acrobat application.

Used properly, these tools provide effective navigation through a PDF file. Though they can be created manually, the best way to create Links and Bookmarks is through the Save As PDF option if it's available. Most electronic links from the original application can be transferred to the PDF, meaning if you update the original file later, the electronic links will still exist in the new file.

Big tip: Create your links within the original application.
Another big tip: Plan your use of styles to better convert to bookmarks.