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LESSON 3 Creating Adobe PDF Files
About creating Adobe PDF files
You can convert a variety of file formats to Adobe PDF, preserving all the fonts,
formatting, graphics, and color of the source file, regardless of the application and
platform used to create it. You can create PDFs from images, document files, web-
sites, scanned paper documents, and clipboard content.
If the document you want to convert to PDF is open in its authoring application
(for example, a spreadsheet is open in Excel), you can usually convert the file to
PDF without opening Acrobat. But if Acrobat is already open, you don’t have to
open the authoring application to convert a file to PDF.
You also need to consider PDF file size and quality (image resolution, for example).
When such factors are critical, you’ll want to use a method that allows you to con-
trol conversion options. Dragging and dropping files on the Acrobat icon to create
PDF files is fast and easy, but if you want more control over the process, use another
method, such as using the Create button in Acrobat or the Print command in the
authoring application. After you specify conversion settings, the settings apply
across PDFMaker, Acrobat, and Acrobat Distiller until you change them.
Lesson 5, “Using Acrobat with Microsoft Office Files (Windows),” describes how to
create Adobe PDF files directly from a variety of Microsoft Office files using
PDFMaker in Windows. Lesson 13, “Using Acrobat in Professional Printing,” covers
the creation of press-quality PDF files.
If the security settings applied to an Adobe PDF file allow it, you can also reuse
the content of the document. You can extract content for use in another authoring
application, such as Microsoft Word, or you can reflow the content for use with
handheld devices or screen readers. 周e success with which content can be repur-
posed or reused depends very much on the structural information contained in
the PDF file. 周e more structural information a PDF document contains, the more
opportunities you have for successfully reusing the content, and the more reliably
a document can be used with screen readers. (For more information, see Lesson 4,
“Reading and Working with PDF Files.”)
Using the Create command
You can use the Create command in Acrobat to convert a variety of different file
formats to Adobe PDF.
You’ll convert a single TIFF file to an Adobe PDF file. You can use this same
method to convert a variety of both image and non-image file types to Adobe PDF.
Note: When
you’re creating a PDF
from within Acrobat,
you must have the
application that created
the original file installed
on your system.
From the Library of Debbie Duff
