Ideally, documents available for download should be in a format that is readable by all interested users. Word-processing or spreadsheet formats (such as .doc and .xls) are not entirely satisfactory for several reasons.
A user may not have the same (or any) version of the word processor or spreadsheet application that created the document. Even if they do, the document may not look the same on their computer or on other computers; what the author sees when the document is created may not be what others will get. This can happen if a user has a different model of printer or if the document uses a font that isn't embedded in the document and that the user doesn't have; another font will have to be substituted, possibly changing the appearance and lay-out from what the author intended or from what others will see. These effects can have surprising consequences on documents with tightly formatted layouts, such as show programs. Also, on long documents, the page breaks will vary from one user to another, making page references unreliable.
Currently, the only format that preserves document appearance and can be viewed and printed consistently on every platform is Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF). Readers are available at no charge from Adobe and are easily installed. And because the PDF format is fully documented, other PDF readers are available for many platforms:
By installing any of these freely-available readers, anyone should be able to view and print PDF documents and, if they have been properly produced, can be confident that they are seeing exactly the same documents as everybody else.It is our policy to use PDF for any web-site material that cannot easily be converted to web pages (HTML format).
For a relatively simple document, it should be possible to convert it to the standardized HTML (web page) format in the application that produced it. For example, in MS-Word, click on File, then Save As, and in the Save As Type strip box at the bottom of the box, choose HTML Document or Web Page. Then choose Save. But for a more complex document, conversion to PDF format may be needed to ensure faithful reproduction of the formatting.
We should be able to convert standard word-processor and spreadsheet documents to PDF for you, provided that you have avoided sophisticated techniques such as macros and used only widely available fonts, such as Arial, Helvetica, Times, and Courier. If you use a very recent version of an application, save the document in the format of an earlier version, or in RTF (Rich Text Format), before sending it to us; verify that the formatting is still as you want it.
Some applications allow you to convert material to PDF from within the application. Separate applications to convert documents in various formats to PDF are available from many sources. The Acrobat applications from Adobe are probably the best available but are quite expensive (except for the Reader), so check out The PDFZone, PlanetPDF, The PDF Corner, Download.com, and Tucows for alternatives. PC Magazine has published a review and comparison of twelve PDF-creating applications.
For example, pdf995 has a ghostscript-based converter for Windows which may be downloaded at no charge; it is fully functional but displays an ad in your browser when you use it (until you pay $9.95 for a license). Similar functionality (without the fee or the ads) is provided by PDFCreator and PrimoPDF.
An alternative is another free ghostscript-based application for Windows and Linux called GSView which allows viewing and interconversion of PostScript™ and PDF files. (On Windows, any printable document can be converted to PostScript™ format by setting up a virtual PostScript™ printer, as explained in detail in these instructions.)
A free multi-platform (Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and Solaris) office suite available here is able to open and edit virtually any Microsoft Office document and export a PDF version.
Of the non-free alternatives available for Windows, the best seems to be pdfFactory for $49.95US.
Another alternative is to use an on-line conversion service. There are several of these, including the following:
Most of these are free; the first one allows up to five free conversions for any e-mail address.After any conversion, verify the appearance of the converted document in a PDF viewer. Conversion to PDF format can change the formatting of a document if the converter has to substitute for non-standard fonts. If formatting changes from the original document are unacceptable, it may be possible to configure the application and the converter you use so that they "embed" all of the fonts used in the original document into the PDF version, though this will increase the size of the PDF file enormously if you have used many fonts.
To minimize the size of a PDF (to allow fast downloads, including e-mails), use only the following typefaces: Times (or Times New Roman), Helvetica (or Arial), and Courier (or Courier New); fonts for these typefaces are available in every PDF reader and so need not be embedded in the document itself. Most PDF generators or converters will by default not embed these fonts.
If you are using the Adobe Reader (any version before 6.0) and the rendering of a document on the screen is noticeably "fuzzy," it is likely that bit-mapped (type 3) fonts have been embedded into the PDF and the Acrobat Reader fuzzes them to make them less readable on the screen. The document will print clearly. If a fuzzy screen view is unacceptable, try to configure the PDF conversion to use only TrueType™ (type 42) or PostScript™ (type 1) fonts; these are "outline" fonts and are not fuzzed by the Adobe Reader. The fuzzing seems to have been intended to encourage the purchase of outline fonts from Adobe! Other PDF viewers render type 3 fonts quite well. This "feature" has finally been removed in version 6.0 of the Adobe Reader.
PDF is not an editing or word-processing format and only some simple forms of editing are possible. However, it is easy to extract the text from a PDF document (and then re-format it in a text editor or word processor). Two free applications that can extract text from PDF documents are GSView and the pdftotext utility of xpdf. Adobe provides a free PDF-to-HTML conversion service. There are also commercial and shareware applications available for various conversions; check the links given above.
For assistance on viewing or producing PDF documents, please contact Bob Tennent.