If you are on the road to the paperless
office, chances are you keep hitting bumps.
One common quandary is dealing with Adobe
Acrobat files, commonly called PDF files.
No doubt, Adobe has cornered the market on
taking text-and-graphics documents and making them digital
wholes. Once installed, Acrobat becomes a virtual printer.
Instead of printing a document on paper, it
prints to a computer file that can be e-mailed, copied to a
CD or sent to your printer to get the paper version.
The PDF file format is heaven-sent because
it locks in the exact layout and typesetting of a document.
It prints a document the same way regardless of whether you
are using a Mac or PC, and it works with just about any
printer.
If you try to exchange files that were
created with other products, like Microsoft Word or Corel's
WordPerfect, results will vary.
Even when people exchange files written in
the same software, like Microsoft Word, they find that it
occasionally prints differently on someone else's computer
because of different fonts.
For example, I once used a Staccato222 BT
font in one of my e-mail notes. This font is small but looks
like a script and makes an attractive signature if it is
enlarged. Unfortunately, the recipient didn't have that
font, so his computer picked a replacement font that
happened to be very bold and large. It made my signature
look huge, not to mention ugly. He wrote me back with a few
unkind comments about the size of my signature.
Had I used Adobe's Acrobat and saved the
e-mail as a .PDF file, the entire contents of my email and
signature would have been turned into a virtual picture. The
look of each font would have been displayed correctly even
without the Staccato222 BT on his computer.
Adobe's Acrobat also has security features
so the author can lock down the content of a file. This is
especially helpful for sending out proposals or finished
work where you don't want someone to edit it.
Now, the only glitch to converting documents
into a .PDF file is if you want to change something and you
cannot find the source file. So, if you created the file in
Word but can only find the .PDF file and not the original
Word .DOC file you'd be out of luck.
Ah, new technology to the rescue. There is
an emerging set of utilities that will take the .PDF file
and convert it back to Word. I've tried several with varying
results.
The best that I've seen is ScanSoft's PDF
Converter for Microsoft Word, www.scansoft.com. This lowcost
utility has saved the day several times when I needed to
change a document but couldn't find the original source
file.
The PDF Converter installs as an add-on to
Word. To use it, you simply install it, then open the .PDF
file from inside Word. The converter takes over to decipher
the document text and graphics and lets you edit.
I tested the converter on all types of .PDF
files with great success. Some of the documents were created
here, and others were from clients. There were a few that
the software could not convert, especially those with all
graphics and no text. Otherwise it was glitch-free.
While it may be one small step toward the
paperless office, using products like these can help make
electronic filing as easy as paper filing.
