PDF Creation

Create PDF – the benefit is in the name

They are portable – Portable Document Format. PDFs carry most if not all of the resources needed to display or print them - text, images, fonts etc. – inside a single file. This makes them portable across different platforms – Windows, Mac, Linux etc.

Although the same could be said of HTML, PDF is much more precise in describing a page (which is of a fixed size) giving the user the confidence that the recipient is looking at the same document that he is, unaffected by differences in hardware, operating system or application software. In the context of the email and internet-driven business culture that we live in today that’s a highly-valued quality – even if we do take it for granted!

Secure PDF – your files are secure

Fixed formats, in particular PDF, can be locked down with security permissions that control what the recipient of the document can do with it, such as copy content, print, mark up with comments etc.

Fixed format documents are essentially a representation of a printed page. They are devoid of metadata associated with authoring tools. You wouldn't want to send a pricelist out as a spreadsheet because you might inadvertently give information away in the calculations about the margin you are making. You wouldn't want to provide an important document such as a contract as a Word file in case they could see uncommitted amendments that reveal information that could give them an advantage in negotiation.

Many organisations have policies and procedures in place to avoid these traps, and make it a rule that when information is shared outside the firewall, be it by email or cloud-based sharing services, that it be in PDF. Since a PDF can be created from virtually any type of document – letter, spreadsheet, presentation, engineering drawing, book, illustration, photograph, publication – this is not the onerous proposition it may sound. The key to success is to make it easy for users to create high quality PDFs from any application. Virtual printers that make PDF files just by selecting the application’s Print command are popular because they are simple and effective.

Creating PDFs

Creating PDFs has never been easier. Once you needed proprietary software (Adobe’s Acrobat) to make them, but to their credit Adobe published the format making it possible for others to produce tools that did the same. One of the first of these was Jaws PDF Creator.

Today, many of the most well-known software applications are able to create PDF directly. Even Microsoft, who originated XPS which rivals PDF as a final-form document format, acknowledges the business need with the save to PDF feature of Office 2007 and Office 2010. Corel too have PDF capability built into WordPerfect Office X5, and CorelDRAW has been able to handle PDFs for many years.

With the plethora of PDF-producing applications available, the landscape has shifted. PDF creation has become a commodity, a facility that’s available in favourite applications or can be obtained at zero or minimum cost. While users have benefitted from this commoditisation, it’s fair to say that the quality of PDFs produced by the abundance of tools available varies widely.