PDF: Recognized standard for document exchange

Zatni Arbi, Columnist, Jakarta, zatni@cbn.net.id

Today, when downloading a document from a website, we usually have the choice of getting it in Word or PDF format.

Word format is preferable if the downloaded document will have to be edited once it is stored on our hard disk. All we have to do is open the file in MS Word.

One thing to keep in mind is that it is best if the Word document has been created using only standard fonts, such as Times New Roman, Helvetica and the typewriter-era courier. As these fonts are very likely available on your computer, there will be no problem in the formatting. The document will appear on your screen as it was formatted by the creator.

If the document uses strange fonts, Microsoft Word will have to replace them with the closest fonts that your system has. Keep in mind that not all fonts are royalty-free. Fonts are created by humans, and therefore they are also copyrighted materials. What that means is that computer users are not actually supposed to share fonts like they share family photos.

In fact, I still remember the days when I had to buy collections of Bitstream and Adobe Postscript fonts to decorate the newsletters I was working on. I needed utilities such as Adobe Type Manager (ATM) to manage these fonts, as I did not want to overload the operating system and slow down my computer with hundreds of fonts that I rarely or never used.

It is necessary for your system to find the closest match for the unique fonts that the downloaded Word document has, so that the layout will not change very much. We all have had the experience of reading "See Figure 3 on page 65", while the object has actually moved to page 72 because the original font was replaced with a slightly wider one.

Exchanging documents in Word format becomes a problem if it contains a lot of graphic images. As the writer of the document adds images, the file size increases accordingly.

* Portability

Adobe Systems thought of these two major problems and smartly introduced a solution, the Portable Document Format, or PDF. This is not surprising, if you recall that this company is the leader in graphics and text publishing tools. So the PDF was a logical product for them.

When a document is already in the PDF format, it can be opened on any computer -- even computers using different platforms -- without any risk of its layout being altered. When a PDF file is created, the fonts are embedded in it. However, since the fonts cannot be reused by the recipients of the document, this does not constitute a copyright infringement.

Also, the size of a PDF file is relatively small even when it contains a lot of graphics images, making it one of the most efficient ways to deliver documents. What is more important is that the document will appear on any computer screen or will print out on any printer exactly as it was intended to appear.

Adobe was smart in anticipating the need for such a document format. It knew that once it became an accepted standard, sales of the US$249 Adobe Acrobat -- the software needed to create PDF files -- would explode. And that is what has happened. Today, the PDF format has become the de facto standard. Courts and government agencies in the U.S., including the IRS, have adopted it as the standard for delivering documents.

* Reader

To be able to open a PDF file, you need a utility called Acrobat Reader. Adobe distributes this utility free of charge, and almost every personal computer today has it. If you do not have it, you can download it from www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/.

A lot of websites also provide a button that you can click to get this utility. Acrobat reader is also available for Palm PDAs and even data-enabled cellular phones with the Symbian operating system. Adobe's strategy of providing the reader for free has worked effectively to drive the acceptance of this format.

What really happens when we create a PDF file? Remember the old days when we were still sending faxes from our PC? We printed Word, Excel or any document file created by almost any software not to a printer but to a fax utility, which we then loaded into the modem so it could be sent. Each time we create a PDF file, we print to Adobe Acrobat. The time needed for the process depends on how powerful our PC is.

If we install Adobe Acrobat on our computer, we have the option of adding a button on the Toolbar of MS Office applications to make the creation of PDF files very easy. All we have to do is click the button, and whichever file is currently open will be saved in a PDF file.

We can use Adobe Acrobat, not only Adobe Acrobat Reader, to open a PDF file. In fact, if we wish to select a text, image or any other document object to be copied to another application -- for example, if we want to copy a column of text in a PDF file to a Word document -- we can do that only with the help of Adobe Acrobat.

* Some alternatives

Unfortunately, $250 may be a bit steep for most of us, especially if we do not churn out PDF files every day. However, there are some cheaper alternatives available. For example, Adobe helps us create PDF files through its website. The service is free for the first five documents that we submit. People in the U.S. and Canada can subscribe to the service for $10 per month or $100 per year.

Or we can download the $50 pdfFactory from www.pdffactory.com. This alternative product can create PDF files from multiple document sources, allow us to manage fonts, etc. If you need encryption to secure your document, you will need the $100 pdfFactory Pro. There is also RoboPDF ($50, www.ehelp.com/), and you can download the trial version.

Other products include the $70 Win2PDF Pro (www.danprairie.com), the Jaws PDF Creator ($100, www.jawspdf.com) and BCL Easy PDF ($50, www.bcltechnologies.com). The most popular product seems to be pdfFactory Pro, though.