· Menopause Center
· Trade Finance Providers
· 1st Design
· Neonic Signs
· PDF Inc
· Garage Media
· Print Legend
· Signs 360
· Monogelato
Quickly and easily created
Struggling to meet every project dead-line. Working to improve your document drafts. Striving to complete those file updates. The PDF is designed to keep up with today’s fast-paced and highly demanding work world. Creating a PDF is meant to take up almost no time at all. Just at a few clicks of a mouse, you’ll be able to send out those document drafts, create electronic versions of your files and still manage everything in between
Securable
Worried about that all too important draft circulating around the office, among prying eyes, or worse yet, over the internet? The ability to secure your PDFs can put you back in control over your work. Adding watermarks, encrypting data, using passwords—these capabilities are only the starting point in securing your PDFs. Depending on the material you are sending electronically, you can determine and decide on the best security measures that work for you.
Compactandable to compress large files
Imagine a room filled with filing cabinets. Imagine large files
of paper to organize and look over. Now, imagine sending them over to
an administrator. A filing clerk’s nightmare? Not anymore. The PDF
can make your job a lot more easier. Imagine a single desk with a computer.
Imagine file names to scan over, convert and click on. Now, imagine sending
them via e-mail. . . . The PDF’s ability to compress large files
is a worker’s dream!
Self-contained
Where viewing the original document source is essential, the
PDF is the ultimate solution. It has the ability to exist independently
from the hardware, software and operating system (OS) used to create or
view the PDF document. What does this mean? It not only makes it easy
to transmit files between computers with different applications, it also
means that you can get your documents across clearly and avoid any communication
problems wherever possible. Preserving the look and feel of the original
source file becomes a priority you don’t have to worry about.
At the same time, with the advantages of the PDF, there come slight disadvantages.
Difficult to Edit
There are significant challenges to working with information
received in PDF by another person. By its nature, PDF is not an editable
document format - even though the appearance of a PDF document mirrors
what you might see in a Microsoft Word document, it cannot easily be changed,
revised or manipulated. Because the PDF is simply an image of a document,
it is almost impossible to edit.
However, this can be easily worked around by converting the PDF file into
another editable format. Investintech’s Able2Extract 3.0, assists
users in converting their PDF documents into editable Word documents and
formatted Excel spreadsheets.
Various types of PDFs
While you can pretty much create a PDF using the same click and select
methods every time, the way in which you input the information to create
them can vary. It will affect the way in which some viewing and converting
functions work.
Two types of PDFs exist: native PDFs and scanned PDFs. A native PDF is a PDF that is made from a document that was electronically processed. A scanned PDF is one that is made by scanning a physical paper document using a scanning device.
What is the PDF format good for?
XP printing format
A document designed and finalized for the printer should be encoded as a PDF. There is no better cross-platform printing format: the pre-formatted layout and all its details, pagination, and print settings will be properly preserved through transport and onto the paper while still staying independent of machine specifics.
Why Use PDF Insead of HTML?
Since the requirements for creating an accessible PDF document
closely mirror the requirements for accessible HTML "conversion",
the effort required is approximately equal. However, one is a proprietary
format, the other is an "open" and public format. One requires
a "free" downloadable "plugin or stand alone app",
the other displays natively in all HTML browsers including text only browsers
and older versions of browsers - no need to upgrade to the latest version.
Most people in the web accessibility field acknowledge that Adobe have made decent strides in improving their tool, but PDF files were, are, and will continue to be cross platform PRINT files, whereas HTML is, was and will always be cross platform monitor display mark up language.
As we move to a more "web-centric" world, not all participants will be using Internet Explorer with the Adobe Plugin. I know this may come as a shock to some, but trust me, it's true. I am not yet aware of an Adobe Acrobat plugin which works for PDAs, Cell Phones, Web ready refrigerators and car dashboards, etc. These tools (toys?) are with us now, and will only continue to proliferate and grow. For this reason, I personally would seek to ensure that my content is available and accessible to everybody, not just the people sitting at a desk with a tower or laptop. As others have pointed out, go ahead and provide the PDF along side the HTML if a print version is truly required, but if you are going to invest effort converting a document from Word or Excel into a format that can be shared via the web, why not go with the original web format - HTML?
