Getting Along With Your Computer

PDF It! By Cate Eales

Remember when “FedEx” became a verb? Suddenly one day, everyone began saying, “FedEx it to Head Office.” Well, “PDF it” has now become a part of our language. But what is it?

A company called Adobe Systems developed the Portable Document Format (PDF) file format so that documents could be viewed cross-platform. For example, you can create a poster with Microsoft Publisher on your Windows computer, but only people with Publisher and Windows will be able to open the file on their computers. And, in order for it to look the way you intended, everyone has to have the same fonts you used. If you convert the document to PDF format, anyone can view it --- Windows, Mac, what have you --- and the fonts and graphics look just the way you produced them.

PDF was invented in the early 1990’s (in the halcyon days of “FedEx It”) and finally seems to have become the standard, edging out competitors including, notably, Microsoft. Most of us encounter PDF documents every day when we use our browsers. Have you ever had to search for a document on the City Hall website? Many, including City Council agendas, are in PDF format. Often, neighbourhood associations and other community groups make their meeting minutes available on the web in PDF format. You can read the documents right there in the browser window, or you can download them and review them at your convenience, without having to be online.

Naturally, the best known way to create a PDF document is to use the program Adobe made for that purpose, Adobe Acrobat. Unless you are running a business, though, you probably don’t want to pay US$299 for the program. Luckily, there are alternatives. Although limited in functionality when compared with Acrobat, any of these will do nicely for the occasional production of a PDF document. What these programs don’t let you do is edit a PDF document.

PDF-Xchange Lite sells for about US$22 and lets you produce a perfectly adequate, no frills PDF document that can be read by Adobe Reader. pdfFactory is pricier at US$49, but will let you combine documents into a single PDF and delete pages before you produce the document. I like PrimoPDF, a free program that converts a document to a PDF file. There are no features in this thing at all, but it does what it says it will do, and then it gets out of your way.

You don’t need to spend any money to get a program to view PDF files. Adobe provides a program called Reader (formerly called Acrobat Reader) free. Reader lets you view and print PDF documents, and it will integrate with Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Netscape browsers so it’s easy to view PDF files that live on websites. Reader has long had a reputation of being big and slow. I believe that’s improved in the last two versions, but if you’re looking for something small and fast, you might give Foxit Reader a try.

Do you have a favourite PDF viewer or PDF creator that isn’t mentioned here? Email me, and we’ll mention them in a future column.

Cate Eales has been helping people make online computing safe, accessible and fun for over 20 years. She lives in Kelowna with her husband, Eric, and her dog, Sandy. Cate is a partner in Real Life Internet Solutions, helping individuals and small businesses with virus, spyware and malware eradication personal computer training and management digital image management music transfer and website design, hosting and management. Email Cate with your comments, suggestions, or questions. To browse the column archives, visit the Real Life Internet Solutions website.

This article is written by or on behalf of an outsourced columnist and does not necessarily reflect the views of Castanet.