2004 vermont municipal e-government conference tuesday may 18, 2004

Using Adobe .pdf Document Format

What is .pdf? PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It is proprietary to the Adobe company and their family of Acrobat software products. However .pdf is highly recommended as a standard for documents served from your website for many reasons, including these four: often it is possible to shrink the size of a large document by converting to .pdf the .pdf format has many inherent security features even then, users need more than just a word processor to download and make unauthorized changes to the document the .pdf capture method cements formatting that would otherwise differ from word processor to word processor, lending your document consistency for all users While the .pdf format is proprietary to one company, something we generally try to avoid, there is a free Adobe Acrobat Reader that anyone can download. As for converting documents to .pdf format, we recommend budgeting to buy the full Acrobat package. The standard version currently costs about $100.00. If you wish, a simple web search will return many other, cheaper or free .pdf conversion packages from other sources. But chances are they do not have all of the security and compression features of the legitimate Adobe product, and they may come with strings attached (i.e. junkware). IMPORTANT: If you use .pdf format on your website, it is a general courtesy to your users to also include the link to the free Acrobat Reader, just in case they don't already have it. To do this, we suggest you use the link www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html, which currently leads directly to the download site. You can also use the image below. Right-click on it to save it to your computer, if you wish. Questions? Contact Will Sawyer at the UVM Center for Rural Studies: crs@uvm.edu (802) 656-3021

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