How to Make a PDF Presentation
The Portable Document Format (PDF) was developed by Adobe to help ensure what you sent could be opened up and viewed pretty much as it was intended to be viewed.
It can be very frustrating to work hard developing a presentation only to find that when your customer or your colleagues open up the presentation, the characters are the wrong size, in the wrong places, the wrong font or are skewed in some bizarre fashion. To ensure your work is viewed the way you intended it to be, or to help prevent it from being co-opted or easily recycled for other purposes, you may make a PDF version of the presentation. This article reviews how to do so.
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Things You'll Need
- Authoring software such as Microsoft Office, StarOffice, OpenOffice or Apple's iWork suite
- A "reader" of PDF files such as Adobe Reader
- Potentially a PDF-generating utility or PDF Printer Driver
Instructions
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There are a few ways to take a presentation that has already been written and produce a version in the Portable Document Format (PDF). One of the more important things to remember in the process is that it should be your concern only as a last step. Because you are going to render the document in PDF form, you may have confidence that what you develop for the screen can be faithfully represented for your customers and coworkers in PDF form.
That said, you should still determine before drafting the document if the system and software you are using are capable of creating a PDF version.
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Consider the Apple Macintosh. When using a Mac with OS X, you may create PDF versions of nearly anything you could send to a printer. In fact, you will print your document to actually create the PDF. The Mac OS has built-in support for PDF documents. By selecting Print from the File menu in a Macintosh environment, you should see a button with support for a number of different PostScript-related activities. At this point, you may choose to save the document as a PDF rather than actually print it. For all intents and purposes, the software is actually printing, but printing to a PDF file instead of a laser printer.
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Consider the authoring software. Many applications have built-in support for creating PDF versions of their files. Microsoft Office 2003, for instance, does not. But StarOffice versions seven and later offer a PDF export from the File menu.
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Consider purchasing a utility. If you're using a Microsoft operating system and your software does not already support direct exporting of PDF documents, there are still options open to you. There are utilities you may purchase, such as 123File Convert (http://www.123fileconvert.com) which build themselves into Microsoft Office and also offer extended capabilities such as the automatic conversion of whole sets of files from Word to PDF or from PDF back into Word format.
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Consider a PDF printer driver. If you want your Windows XP or 2000 system to function the way the Mac does, and just print a PDF, choose a PDF printer driver. This is a pseudo-device that pretends to be a printer while it creates a PDF file on your computer. Applications don't know the difference, so it works with any and all the software running on your system. There is one available from SourceForge.net, for example (see Resources, below). Sourceforge is an open-source software organization dedicated to creating such useful tools and capabilities.
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Tips & Warnings
It pays to preview your PDF before you send it out. Sometimes font-mapping processes common to any printing process can still make your presentation look different from the way it does on-screen. Check to see what features are available with your PDF exporting or printing application. You may be able to set how the PDF opens with features such as full-screen and with or without a table of contents.
Be careful of what you download off the Internet. There may be PDF utilities and "free" software that isn't safe or worth the hassle. Printing PostScript and PDF are different but often confused with each other. PostScript is a printer-ready language not readily readable on other people's machines. Portable Document Format (PDF) is a format designed to be read on other people's machines. The Internet has many PDF reader programs available, but the most common is by Adobe. The reader may be downloaded and used without charge. A feature-rich suite of applications is also for sale by Adobe for those who will make their living in and around PDF, graphics and other publishing documents.
Resources
- Photo Credit Images by Paul Nelis
