Purpose

The purpose of this document is to help MCPS users:

1. Set the Preferences in Acrobat Distiller to optimize PDFs for Screen View
2. Create a PDF from a Word document
3. Link to a PDF document from a web page.

Users
Users of this tutorial are webmasters who need to convert Office formatted documents to PDF for web viewing. You must have the full version of Adobe Acrobat installed on your workstation to use this process. The following graphics were prepared using the full version of Adobe Acrobat which includes Acrobat Distiller 5.0.

Essential Information

Acrobat Distiller – Setting Preferences for Web View
This section will show you how to check and/or adjust the settings on your workstation to be able to create PDFs that are web-friendly. PDFs need to load quickly on the web and be backwards compatible to at least Acrobat 4.0 (and 3.0 if possible.) This document addresses only those workstations with the “full” version of Acrobat 5.0 installed which includes Acrobat Distiller. Preferences need to be set only once per workstation.

1. From the programs menu open the Acrobat Distiller application. You will see the following window on your screen.
   
   
   
   
2. In the window by Job Options, select Screen from the drop-down box.
   
   
   
   
3. With the Screen option selected, go to the menu bar Settings, pull down the menu and select Job Options...
   
   
   
   
4. Select the General tab. Make sure your settings match those shown below. The important settings are the Compatibility, check for Optimize for Fast Web View, and Resolution: 600 dpi.
   
   
   
   
5. Once these changes are entered in your dialog window, click OK. If you are asked to save your settings, save as screen.joboptions in the Settings folder.
   
   
   
   
6. You are done with this task. Exit the Acrobat Distiller program.

Creating a PDF from Word
In order to create a PDF for use on the web, we want to start with the original electronic document open. Often this is available to as a Microsoft Office document. For this example, I’ll use a Word document, but this also works with other types of Office documents.

1. If the workstation has the “full” version of Acrobat installed, you can “print” from Word to Acrobat Distiller.
   
   
   
   
2. We do this just as we would “print” to a local printer, but we select the printer “Acrobat Distiller” from the printer options. See the illustration below.
   
   
   
   
3. Optionally, some newer versions of Word (Office) have an icon to create a PDF. This makes it even easier.
   
   
   
   
4. The Acrobat Distiller application takes the document output and re-formats it as an Adobe Acrobat document.
5. You will be asked to give the newly created document a name and save it in the .pdf format. Distiller will assign the document a default name derived from the Word document name with the .pdf suffix appended.
   
   
   
   
6. You may choose to accept the default name or rename it to one of your choosing. As for any filename used on the web, it is recommended that you use no embedded spaces or punctuation in the filename. You can use hyphen (-) or underscore ( _ ) if needed for readability.
   
   Good: readinglist.pdf Bad: My Favorite Books.pdf or Grade #2 reading.pdf
   
   
   
   
   
7. When the re-formatting is complete, the Adobe Acrobat application will launch with the new document open.
   
   
8. To improve users' ability to search for the document on the web, I suggest you add Document Properties – Summary… which becomes meta-data for the document on the web. This option is under the File submenu.
   
   
   
   
9. The Document Summary dialog box looks like the following illustration. Be sure to fill in at least the Title and Keywords. Keywords should be separated by a comma. When finished, click on the OK button to close the dialog window.
   
   
   
   
10. Now save the PDF again so the document includes the summary you’ve just added.

Note: The size of the PDF will greatly increase as images are added even when the individual images have been optimized for the web. (When formatted for PDF, the images are considered as part of the whole document. Smaller is better for the web as it is the determining factor for download speeds. No dial-up user will wait for a 1.5MB PDF to download. To create a smaller sized PDF for web viewing, use a minimal number of inserted pictures.

Linking to a PDF from a Web Page

1. PDFs are uploaded to the server using an FTP client in the same way as any other file. Because they are documents, not web pages, for organization purposes, you may want to keep PDFs together in a folder called pdf or docs to separate them from the graphics and web page files.
2. Links to PDFs are made in the same way as links to another web page. When browsers are configured to open PDFs in the browser window, a link to a PDF document launches the Adobe Acrobat Reader plug-in. As a courtesy to users with low bandwidth (dial-up users) it is good to let them know that this link will go to a PDF document, and give the size of the document. This gives them an opt-out before you’ve locked up their browser. An example of this is shown below.
   
   

If you’re interested, the HTML code for the link looks like this:

<a href=”/departments/publishingservices/PDF/strategicplanannualreport.pdf”
Annual Report on Our Call to Action:<br> Strategic Plan for the Montgomery County Public Schools</a> (5400K PDF)

Note: The advantages of using the PDF format over a Word format for posting documents on the web are:

1. The PDF formatting is fixed and you know exactly how the viewer will see it.
2. If you don’t want it changed, the PDF format is harder to edit than a word processing document.
3. The PDF is a web standard for displaying documents and is universally available via free plug-in to all web users. If the user has a different version of Word or Office than the creator of the document, a Word document may lose some of its formatting.
4. Alternatively, if you want to provide “shells” that the user is expected to modify and customize, it is more appropriate to use a Word document or an interactive PDF form rather than the PDF format.

What if I have a problem or question?
Contact the Web Services Team at webmaster@mcpsmd.org