Information on PDF files

What is a PDF (Portable Document Format) file?

The current digital prepress process works, but it is fraught with problems. Many customers supply us with their jobs in the native file format, (eg Quark/Pagemaker etc). But these jobs often have problems with missing components such as graphics or fonts and enormous file sizes. Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) was devised to specifically avoid many of these problems.

The PDF file format offers the following benefits.
Complete: A PDF file contains all of the fonts, graphics and page layout information necessary to display and print the file exactly as you laid it out. No more missing pictures or fonts!

Compact: PDF supports a variety of compression methods, creating smaller files that are easier to transmit and faster to print than the native application files.

The main disadvantage of PDF files is that only relatively small corrections can be made within the PDF file itself, however this is not usually a problem as it is usually simpler to amend the original native document and re-create the PDF file. The only other disadvantage is that some colour jobs may not output correctly unless they are saved as pre-separated PDF files.

Adobe Acrobat Distiller

Adobe's Acrobat Distiller is the program you are most likely to be using in order to create PDF files. First you need to output your document as a Postscript file, then, using Acrobat Distiller you convert this file into a PDF file. There are a number of settings that you need to set correctly in order to produce a PDF file suitable for printing.

Below is a list of some sites which give good advice about the various options available with the Adobe program.
Creating PDFs     This site contains a lot of useful information and help.
PDF Zone            Useful site for everything PDF related.
Adobe                 The site from the authors of Acrobat itself.

To summarise

1. A PDF file contains all the graphics, fonts and page layout details. There are no additional files (such as fonts) required to display and output the file.

2. PDF files are generally smaller in size than the original application document. This often makes it possible to e-mail files that would otherwise be too large or impractical to send.