PDF Tips, Tricks, and Notes

When you want to send a file to someone and you want to make as certain as possible that it displays for them as you intended, you might want to send that file as a PDF.

When you want to send a file to someone and you do not wish them to alter it, you might want to send that file as a PDF.

To create PDFs you will need the full commercial version of Adobe Acrobat.*

For anyone to be able to view your PDFs they would only need the free Adobe Acrobat Reader.

Special:

If you have Adobe Illustrator or Adobe Photoshop installed on your machine, you can create PDF’s from them without the full Acrobat. They have built-in PDF creation features. You do this by selecting Save As and choosing PDF.

Can users alter your PDF documents?

Not really. But they can grab everything out of it. You can select all the text and copy and paste it into another document. You could take screen snapshots of the images and copy and paste them into another document. There is probably some utility that does all this in one stroke. Also, as PDF is basically code (you can actually look at it using Bbedit, possibly a PC app also) so someone who really knows the Postscript Language could conceivably tweek the code around to alter your document but after you look at the code you will see how daunting this task would be. So basically if you send a PDF document to someone you can be reasonably assured it cannot be altered.

Using the web:

Another way to create a PDF is you could also use Adobe’s online creation service where you upload your file and it comes back as a PDF. Free for the first three times then you must pay a fee. Keep this bookmark for emergencies: http://cpdf1.adobe.com/index.pl?BP=IE

Advanced tip for Mac:

For advanced users, if you have the full version of Acrobat and you are having difficulty creating a PDF document for whatever reason, you could try printing to a Postscript file and then just using the Distiller portion of Acrobat to convert it to a PDF. This sometimes works where other ways fail to create the PDF the way you expect it.

*Yes, I know there are some free PDF creating programs but they are limiting.

Mac only trick:

If you don’t have Adobe Acrobat but have Illustrator, you can use Illustrator to create your PDFs from you other programs. What you do is you print to a File from Word or whatever program. In your print dialog box there will be an option to change it from Printer to File. You should also change the Save as File options to be Level 2 and 3, Binary, and All But Standard 13. Select these settings whenever you print to a file.

Then you launch Illustrator and open the Postscript file that you just printed. You can then save it as a PDF. Hey, this is convoluted but it will work in a pinch.

PC only trick from Simon Pride:

Yes, the Distiller app is available on the PC and will work the same way. The difference is that on Windows there is no native Print to > PostScript file option available in the Print dialog. To get the same effect the users must first install a PostScript printer (I always recommend the Apple LaserWriter IIgs as a nice clean PS printer driver) on port FILE: and then when they print they must choose this printer. When they do this and hit Print they will be prompted to give the file a name. If they call it <filename.ps> I think the extension is automatically associated with Distiller when it is installed. If that is correct then all they have to do is double click on the file they wrote and it will be Distilled into a PDF.

You can't use the HP printer drivers, because of the way HP arranges for the printers to know whether a job is PostScript or HP's native PCL PDL (Page Description Language). This is done by prepending a little text command to the beginning of the stream sent to the printer, being @!PCL or !@PS or something very similar. This causes the printer to switch PDL modes, but as it isn't a legal beginning for a PostScript file it causes all other PostScript systems, including Distiller, to either reject the file or produce garbage.

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Hope some of these tips can help you. – Michael and the Support team.