PDF commentary

I have found in my travels that PDF is not very well understood on campus. I’ll try to clear up some of this confusion.

PDF is a file format that is essentially a virtual printout. It looks the same on each computer on which it is opened. Pagination, margins, fonts, and layout are all very consistent from place to place when you save a document as PDF. This means that a form or brochure that has been professionally done is best distributed as PDF.

Another reason to save files as PDF is that anyone can download a free PDF reader application. That means that you don’t have to worry about whether someone outside campus has Microsoft Word 2003 software.

Adobe sells software to create and modify PDF documents. This software allows you to make fillable forms that can be distributed and submitted electronically. Adobe provides a very nice comment markup system that can even work when people have the lowly free Reader application.

In most departments there is no need to pay for the Adobe software. We can use a free solution called PDF Creator that acts as a virtual printer. Any document or application that has a “print” option can then be turned into a PDF. This is a better option than scanning to PDF on a copy machine. This is because a copy machine takes a photographic image of your text. The resulting PDF is really just a picture, so you can’t cut or copy the text from it. This problem is resolved by using PDF Creator.

I’ve spent an hour now trying to fix some broken PDFs and I must say this is not a joyous experience. The docs have correct file sizes but display as blank pages in Adobe Reader. None of the features in Acrobat 8 Professional seem to help recover the data. There are a couple of free tools that claim to be able to repair PDFs under certain circumstances (not mine though). First was PDFTK, also known as PDF toolkit. This is a command line tool for Windows that does various document processing functions. Another that I’m trying is called jPDFtweak. It is a java based GUI tool that claims to be the “Swiss Army Knife for PDF files”. So far it has crashed on both my Mac and my Vista machine.

Looks like I’ll be recommending a rescanning project!

We’ve been going through some testing of different online forms here at IWU. We can now use Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Professional to make fillable PDF forms that users can save on their local computers. The neat part is that the users don’t need the full version to save and pass along these fillable forms - they just need Adobe Reader.

Now, for other uses, there are already free alternatives. If we need to create a static, flat PDF, PDF Creator has been quite effective. It works like a virtual printer so any printable document could be converted to PDF free of charge. No need for touchy MS Office plugins either. Of course if a Mac user wants a PDF it is already integrated into the Print dialog in OS X.

I’ve also been looking into the quality of output from these various sources. There have been a few font embedding issues from Quark on Macs that don’t happen with Acrobat. hmmm….