Never underestimate the value of PDF

Matt Leung Assistant Managing Editor

Even as Vassar aims to make computing easier with a new library printing system and an all-campus wireless network, the basics of moving electronic documents still leaves some students befuddled.

There is no sure-fire way to take something created on one computer screen and send it over the Internet to another computer completely unchanged—whether it’s an essay, a graphic publication or a complex interactive document. The old method of distributing a document on paper still seems the best option.

For example, if you send a document created in Microsoft Word, the recipient might not have the right application to view it, or he or she may have a different version, leading to compatibility issues.

Adding to the headache, if you put graphics into your essay or spreadsheet, they often swell up the file size to the point where it’s not efficient to send over e-mail. In short, when sending documents over the Internet, you can’t control how it will look to the other person. The portable document format (PDF), created to help solve this problem, emerged in the early 1990s. Though this standard has existed since Windows 95, many still do not use it and instead struggle with it.

Adobe created the PDF format to facilitate sharing documents with others. It has grown to also allow for collaboration on a document by multiple users. Although there were many competitors offering universal file formats with the same concept, they eventually faded out as the PDF format gained popularity.

The International Organization for Standardization, the global organization composed of private industries that decides what the standards are for the consumer, standardized the PDF format for use in printing, archive, graphic arts and general documents. Macintosh has also adopted it as the native metafile format (a universal file format in its operating system).

Presently, Adobe Systems holds the monopoly for universal document sharing with this format—if you want to make a document readable to anyone with a computer, PDF is the format to use. The implementation of Adobe’s PDF format requires an application that creates or converts files to this format and reads the PDF files.

For Windows users, one common way to create a PDF file from any application (such as Word or Excel) is to use the PDF Convert included in the standard or professional edition of Adobe Acrobat. It acts as a print driver, and you follow the same procedure as you would to print the document, except that you choose the PDF converter to print to instead of your actual printer. Mac users can choose “save as PDF” in the print option. This method allows you to ensure that the person you send the file to will see exactly what you see on your screen, avoiding distortion or formatting conflict.

Another advantage is that, by default, the PDF converter embeds the required fonts
into the file. So if you use some not-so-popular fonts in your document, the recipient’s computer can still properly display it.

The feature that allows PDF to surpass the reliability of printed documents is file encryption.

The professional version also allows you to write comments onto a PDF file. Additionally, it allows you to embed music into the file, create forms that others can fill and print out adjust advanced options to prepare for commercial printing, or have your document read back to you by a digital voice. The new Adobe Acrobat 3D application allows for 3D content to be embedded into standard PDF files.

Adobe has helped address the difficulty of sharing documents among different platforms by monopolizing a file standard. However, this might be shaken in the future by Microsoft’s newly developed file format for the same purpose: XPS (XML—Extended Markup Language—Paper Specification).

In an effort similar to the integration of Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player, Microsoft is already planning to monopolize XPS by integrating it into Windows Vista, the next version of Windows.

With a standard PDF format, possibilities for computing open: with all the computing improvements on campus, you can create a PDF document at Sunset Lake on your laptop, use the wireless network to send it to the library print stations, and pick up your PDF document (in print form) later that day.