Making PDFs: A Modern Primer

How to make high-quality PDFs: A primer summarizing the six methods available to almost anyone.

There are a great many questions going around lately about making PDFs. Between e-mail, the Graphic Design Resource Group, and QuarkVSInDesign.com this week alone I answered the following questions and misconceptions about creating PDFs:

“How do you save a photoshop file in acrobat pdf form?”

“A print shop once told me that if you simply type pdf after the title name you choose—it will change.”

“I find if you resave by ‘printing’ it through Distiller the file’s size is even smaller than anything you can save through Photoshop or Illustrator.”

“How can I reduce the size of a PDF that is first designed in photoshop and then saving it as PDF?”

“You can print to Distiller… (PDF distillation via PostScript) or you can save your Photoshop file as an EPS and drag it to the Distiller icon.”

“I was taught to stick with an EPS-to-Distiller workflow, though full PostScript files work fine for me too.”

“Anyone know of an easier way to make a press-ready PDF from Quark 6 on Mac than printing to [PostScript] and [Distilling]?”

“InDesign Shmindesign. Quark’s PDFs are at least printable!”

“Acrobat [6] Profesional is great for proofing clients, but what program can I use to send PDFs for press?”

Given the proliferation of questions and misconceptions, I thought a primer might be in order.

There are five main ways to make a PDF with the two most recent versions of Adobe Acrobat, versions 6 and 7. With certain other Adobe products—InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, and GoLive—there is a sixth way. With Adobe Acrobat versions 2-5, there was a seventh, now defunct, method. All seven methods of creating PDFs will be discussed succinctly below.

As Easy As Printing

1. The method most commonly known to most users is printing to an Acrobat virtual printer. In versions 6 & 7 this printer is called “Adobe PDF” or “Create Adobe PDF,” and it appears in the operating system’s printers folder just like any other printer. What makes this printer “virtual” is the fact that it creates a PDF file rather than printing ink to paper, like the Hewlett-Packard printer beside you would.

With this method, an opened document can be printed from any application on the system. In Notepad, for example, choosing Print from the File menu will present a list of installed printers, one of those being Adobe PDF or Create Adobe PDF. Simply select the printer and press the Print button. For more control over the quality, file size, and features of the resulting PDF, choose Properties, Printer Properties, or a similar button to access the Adobe PDF or Create Adobe PDF options. These options are virtually identical to those found in Distiller (see below).

PDFs printed in this manner have the same features and quality as any PDF created through Distiller, assuming the user has configured equal settings.

Distiller: It’s Not Just For Bathtubs Anymore

2. Creating a PDF directly through Acrobat Distiller. Distiller is the PDF creation engine at the heart of all modern Acrobat PDF-generation functions (it was not a part of PDFWriter noted below).

Acrobat Distiller is an application with a user interface unto itself. An icon, shortcut, or alias should be in the same location as the one for the main Acrobat application (e.g. “Adobe Acrobat Distiller 7.0″ with “Adobe Acrobat Professional 7.0″). By opening Distiller directly, different options for PDF creation become available. For example: Distiller will directly open and distill PostScript files (.PS) and Encapsulated PostScript files (.EPS).

PostScript files are typically entire print jobs printed from a host application to a .PS file—effectively printer language to draw the text and/or pictures from the host’s layout. When they are created expressly for manual processing through Distiller, the procedure is called the “two-step method” of PDF creation.

Encapsulated PostScript files are typically smaller than an entire job, often a single page or just a small drawing converted to the highly portable .EPS file format.

These and certain other file formats may be processed manually or semi-automatically through Distiller in one of three manners: 1) By opening them into Distiller with File > Open; 2) by dragging and dropping the files into the main Distiller window’s drop area, and; 3) by configuring a “watch folder,” a folder on the system that Distiller monitors, waiting for a convertable file to appear, at which point Distiller will automatically begin the conversion to PDF.

Click N’ Convert

3. In Acrobat versions 6 & 7 conversion support was added for more file types, as was support for on-demand conversion through the operating system’s contextual menu. On-demand conversion translates into the ability to right-click a .TIF or .HTML or other supported file and choose “Convert to Adobe PDF.” PDFs created via this method invoke Distiller, but the process is almost transparent; after choosing the right-click menu option, the user interaction is finished. Within a few moments a PDF version of the source file will appear, ready for printing, e-mailling, sharing, or burning.

Are You Ready to Meet Your PDFMaker?

4. Into certain non-Adobe applications Acrobat installs special features or plug-ins to enable a faster, more direct method of PDF creation than the universal means of printing to Adobe PDF or Create Adobe PDF available to all programs. In programs like Microsoft Word, Microsoft Excel, and (Windows-only, Acrobat 6 & 7 only) Internet Explorer, Acrobat versions 5, 6 & 7 install “PDF Maker,” a special tool created solely for these applications. PDF Maker enables one-click PDF generation from the currently active document.

While printing to Adobe PDF or Create Adobe PDF is, of course, available to these applications as well, using PDF Maker has certain special advantages. For example: Microsoft Word documents may contain clickable hyperlinks, bookmarks, a table of contents, and indexes. When printing to Adobe PDF or Create Adobe PDF, these special features appear exactly as they would when printed to an ink and paper printer, flat and non-clickable.

By using PDF Maker, however, hyperlinks in a Word document remain clickable hyperlinks in the resulting PDF. Bookmarks in Word become bookmarks in the PDF, which also become clickable entries in Acrobat’s or Reader’s Bookmarks tab. And, Word’s table of contents and indexes also become clickable and add entries to the Bookmarks tab, making navigation of longer PDFs extremely easy.

The special features imparted by PDF Maker vary with each host application—in Internet Explorer, for example, hyperlinks remain clickable, form fields turn into Acrobat PDF form fields (new to Acrobat 7), and Flash animations embedded in HTML embed into—and play within!—the resulting PDF file (Acrobat 6 & 7).

Inside Out

5. From within the Acrobat application itself PDFs may also be created by several means, including: Opening various supported file types as PDF—thus invoking Distiller hidden in the background; opening Web pages as PDFs; scanning into Acrobat, which automatically generates a PDF, and; splitting existing PDFs into multiple PDF files.

PDFs Without Acrobat

6. Setting aside the Acrobat application itself, Adobe’s other major creative products, their “point products,” can all natively generate PDFs, even without Acrobat installed on the system. InDesign Exports to PDF, Illustrator and Photoshop have PDF as a choice when saving new files, and GoLive can even automatically generate PDFs from a website layout (for proofing, for instance).

All of these non-Distiller PDFs from Adobe point products are 100% PDF. They are clean PostScript (the language on which PDF and press workflows are based), and they are press-ready (with the correct options). With InDesign, an entire book comprised of multiple chapters saved in separate InDesign files can even be converted to a single, solid PDF with no more work than exporting a single .INDD file to PDF!

All of the above six PDF-creation methods generate high-quality, press-ready PDFs. Or, they can generate low-resolution, small file size PDFs, depending entirely upon the options chosen by the user. No one method generates a higher quality PDF than any other, again, assuming all user configurable settings are equal.

The Red-Headed PDF Step-Child

7. The last method, which is fortunately no longer an option in the last two releases of Acrobat, is PDFWriter. A mainstay of Acrobat from versions 2 through 5 (though only installed in version 5 if the user deliberately chose to install it), PDFWriter was referred to as a “quick and dirty” PDF creation method. Its description was apt.

Unlike any Distiller or save/export PDF generation method, PDFWriter was solely a screen-resolution PDF creator. Its PDF files were the same quality as taking a screenshot or picture of the computer screen. It did not support special features like hyperlinks, bookmarks, transparency, or security. It could be printed, but the quality was was so poor printing on even the lowest quality printer was ill-advised. Contrasting sharply with PDFWriter’s 72 dots per inch PDFs were even sub-$100 home inkjet printers that produced 300 dpi printouts.

PDFWriter installed as a second virtual printer alongside Acrobat Distiller, which led to a great deal of user confusion. Users looked at the two choices in their applications’ Print dialogs and opted for the one that actually had “PDF” in the name; it was usually a poor choice, though most users didn’t realize it.

Because there were no options to configure, and because 72 dpi PDFs looked fine in the 72 dpi realm of computer screens, PDFWriter became the defacto standard for PDF file creation for many, many business users. Even if they recognized that PDF files made with this applet could never be printed on a printing press (typically 600-2400 dpi quality), PDFWriter’s lack of options made it more friendly than Distiller.

The world was awash with the lowest-quality PDFs possible, which is why Adobe discontinued PDFWriter after phasing it out with Acrobat version 5. The PDFWriter code itself had not been updated since Acrobat version 3, six years before. It was ancient technology, by all the standards that matter, and it needed to be done away with. Distiller-based engines are the only way to get quality PDFs.

Regrettably, many non-Adobe, usually free, PDF-creation applications and routines use the PDFWriter method. Thus, though PDFWriter itself is long gone, low quality PDFs are still being created by the ream.

Graduating PDF-U

As you can see, though Adobe discontinued PDFWriter, it also replaced it with several better ways to make PDF files. Anyone who has Acrobat 6 (released April 2003) or Acrobat 7 (released December 2004) installed, has at least four distinctly different means of creating PDFs. With Microsoft Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Visio; AutoDesk’s AutoCad, or; Windows Internet Explorer a fifth and faster means becomes available. With all Adobe Creative Suite (1 or 2) point products, with or without Acrobat, an even easier Save or Export PDF creation means opens up.

Of them all, the two-step method for creating PDFs is the most labor intensive with its print to PostScript then Distill methodology. In years past, the two-step method was required for quality PDF output from many programs, most notably QuarkXPress. But with modern versions of Acrobat, printing to Adobe PDF or Create Adobe PDF is just as reliable and results in PDFs of the same highest quality. In fact, the two-step method has been relegated to the role of troubleshooting step, used only when the source application generates errors on printing.

Now, you have choice. Whichever of the above methods best fits your workflow, you may choose because now you know they exist and they work. The whole point of all these different methods of making PDFs is to give you, the creative, choice. Each method has its advantages and its special uses, like PDFMaker’s support for special features in Word, Excel, and other ubiquitous business applications. Some, like printing to Adobe PDF or Create Adobe PDF in any application capable of printing, are a broad catchall.

Making PDFs with Acrobat or other PDF-enabled programs is rapid, facile, and much, much more plentiful than most realize. Try out these methods and dispell your misconceptions about the need to take extraordinary measures to make press-ready PDFs. In most cases, it’s as simple as printing or saving.