Seven words for making better PDFs  Used June 3, 2008

by Amy Hartman, Research and Extension

Do you need to make your PDFs look better online?  Some K-State employees make multi-megabyte fuzzy PDFs that are unsearchable images of text.  Few people know how to add usable titles to a PDF's Document Properties, which is displayed as the document title in search results. And some people use spaces in file names for online documents, which can cause problems.

Here are suggestions for making better PDFs in seven words:

• Use text.
• Under one megabyte.
• Add titles.

Here's how to do these with the full Acrobat software. (These features are not in the free Adobe Reader.)  For more details, see the

Google_and_Acrobat handout (PDF).

Use text: Make your PDF from an existing document. If you have the full Acrobat, many current applications have a "convert to Acrobat" feature, or can be printed to Acrobat. Or you can use use Acrobat's feature by clicking File, then Create PDF from file. The text of the PDF will be searchable if the original document was searchable.

If you're starting from a paper document, and have scanned it as an image because an original electronic file isn't available, you can re-create the text via Acrobat's Document menu and selecting OCR Text Recognition. Optical character recognition makes the text searchable, and generally makes the file size smaller.

Under one megabyte: For web use, make your PDF as small as possible. It should be under one megabyte. In the full Acrobat 8 version, use the Document menu and select Reduce File Size. (In older Acrobat versions, this feature is under File, then Reduce File Size.

Add titles: In the full Acrobat application, use Control D (or go to File, then Properties) to open the dialog box so you can add a good title. Keep it fairly short, as Google displays only the first 64 characters or so in search results.

For PDFs as well as any other online file, follow these naming guidelines:

• Don't use spaces in file names on the Web.
• Replace spaces with underscores.
• Spaces in file names can confuse web browsers and put odd characters in your file's web address.
• File names should be short enough to be convenient to type.

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