They are not meant to be golden rules but after years and years of doing them I find they come in handy!

Click the image below to download the PDF.

Six “rules” for making an on-screen PDF

Here they are:

• Do it in RGB not CMYK This may not be an issue when exporting the PDF from Word or Powerpoint but very much is if exporting the PDF from Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign. In InDesign go Edit > Transparency Blend Space > RGB.
• Use A4 (297mm by 210mm) or Letter (279.4 mm by 215.9 mm) size so it will print out on desktop printers This just makes it easier for people using your PDF to print it out.
• Do not put anything within 10mm of the edge of the page as it may not be printed out by a desktop printer Most printers will not print right to the edge of the paper. This is a shame if you have a background image or graphic covering the whole page and is worth noting when considering a background.
• Make the format landscape not portrait so that the PDF fills the screen Seems obvious, but …
• Use vectors (AIs, EPSs) for graphics and logos not JPGs or other bitmaps This is a big, big issue for me. I am often very surprised to see PDFs from large corporations who have graphics (in some cases their own logos) in a jagged, pixellated bitmap form when the vector will appear beautiful and sharp in a PDF. It is possible to export PDFs with vectors from the Adobe products (Illustrator, Photoshop or InDesign) but, sadly, impossible when exporting from Word or Powerpoint. Mac users, good news! Apple’s Pages application, which is free with all Mac’s, will create PDFs with vectors! If you don’t know the difference between vectors and bitmaps download the PDF and you will see what I mean.
• Enable interactive elements and hyperlinks so that users can click on websites and email addresses One of the great benefits of PDFs are their interactivity. It is important to check when exporting, especially from InDesign, that Interactive Elements and Hyperlink are checked so that buttons, web addresses and email addresses are clickable.

Interactive PDFs and rich media PDFs

I have written more about interactive PDFs and how to make them on this site. Also there are many more exciting things that can be done with the humble PDF. Buttons, rollovers and showing and hiding layers on a page are all possible in PDFs. Video and audio can also be added (either embedded or streamed from the internet). It is an area of great potential.

What are your experiences?

Do you make on-screen PDFs for widespread circulation? What are they for? How do you make them and what sort of extra functionality do they have? Do you have any more “rules” to add to mine?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

If your client hands you a .PPT from MS PowerPoint or and .DOC Word and says: “The presentation/print deadline is tomorrow, make this look nice”, what are you going to do?

The answer is to use other programs such as Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Quark, Premiere or Keynote and get creative!

Here are a few tips I’ve picked up over the years of doing this.

Make sure you import your client’s text into InDesign and Quark rather than copy and paste it

Why? Because it keeps the formatting (bolds, italics, heads, subheads, notes, etc). If your client has gone through the document and done this there’s no need for you to do it again. OK, you may not like your client’s choice of formatting or font, you can change that globally over the whole document in seconds. Use the Style Sheets or Utilities > Font Usage in Quark and Paragraph Styles or Type > Find Font in InDesign to turn the sow’s ear into a silk purse.

If you want a presentation to look good don’t do it in PowerPoint

I know this isn’t always an option as all the world and his wife seem to want to use PowerPoint for any purpose but, if you can’t persuade the client to go for Premiere or Keynote, there’s always the PDF. The good old PDF will give you an excellent presentation with vectors supported, movies played and excellent interactivity.

You’ve got to do it PowerPoint, now what do you do?

In PowerPoint go File > Page Setup and that’ll give you the size of the slide. Then go to Photoshop go File > New and type in the same height and width values from PowerPoint, create your attention-grabbing masterpiece, save it as a PNG (transparency is supported) and then back in PowerPoint go Insert > Picture > From File… and select your PNG.

OK, so you can do that for every page of a 40 slide deck if your client wants to edit the text, but it’ll add a bit of extra fizz to the proceedings.

Get your client to provide you with the source files

If there’s a blurry bitmap graph or chart that you need to beautify, ask if it exists as a PDF or ask for the source files. Even if it was the ugly result of a PowerPoint-Excel partnership the chances are it can be copied and pasted into Illustrator and the type can be changed and the excess crud can be deleted.

Similarly a PDF can be opened from within Illustrator with the type and the vectors editable, if the wind is blowing in the right direction, if you’re lucky!

For both of these routes you may find all the elements refusing to be ungrouped. If this is the case go Object > Clipping Mask > Release and Object > Compound Path > Release and then ungroup and see where that gets you.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

The advantages of PDF publishing over internet publishing are:
1 No need to worry about browser and platform differences or about being standards compliant – if you can view a PDF properly in Reader the chances are that everyone else in the world can.
2 You can use any font you want.
3 Vector graphics appear pin sharp at any magnification.
4 You don’t need an internet connection to read or print it.

Ah, I hear you say, the web is interactive but PDFs aren’t. Wrong again!

More about this subject and how to create them in InDesign.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Take navigation. Everybody loves to click on articles in a contents page to go to that page, or click on an icon to get back to the contents page, or click “next page” or “previous page” to move through the document. Set up a master page in InDesign with a button set to the bookmark of your contents page and left and right “page turners” set to previous page and next page and, bang, you’ve done it! No need to mess around with your PDF in Acrobat Professional tediously setting all the links.

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Answer: Open in Acrobat, go File > Reduce File Size.

Correct, that usually does the trick. But I had a particularly cumbersome PDF and a client that really couldn’t handle files of more than 1Mb and it steadfastly refused to reduce down further than 5Mb.

What did I do?

Answer: Go: Advanced > PDF Optimiser.

You then have more ways to downsize. Hints: Make compatable with Acrobat 7 – the later the version the smaller the file size. Put all the images down to 72 if you haven’t already. Leave the Scanned Pages unless you have, erm, scanned pages. There maybe some fonts to discard. Leave the Transparency bit alone (I found it increased the size!). Under Discard objects and Clean up – tick everything in sight!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Elements not printing out or printing out darker or fainter than they should. Why? The element – beit type or a box or anything – has been set to overprint.

Overprinting is great. Black type on a tinted or coloured background is much better overprinted. Problem is, further down the production process, maybe the black type gets changed to white and promptly disappears!

Two things you can do (assuming you’re printing from PDFs).

One. Check the file with Overprint Preview ticked in Acrobat 6 and above.

Two. Instead of locating the offending element and switch the overprinting off, simply go in to advanced settings in Distiller and uncheck the Preserve Overprint box.

Simple, eh?

I’ve only just found out about it!

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.

Everyone has their favourite way, but whichever method is used there always seems to be some unforeseen errors creeping into the final file occasionally

Why are some elements obscured behind other elements visible in the final PDF?

This has been causing me some problems recently and I wonder if anyone has anything to add on the subject.

Say there is an innocuous text box or picture box that is lounging around behind a bigger non-opaque object in Quark or any other application. Fine, no big deal. No one’s gonna see it when you print out, you think. Wrong! Sometimes it is visible on the PDF. Even worse, visible on some people’s machines but not others!

Any thoughts?

This is an article from Rob Cubbon
Please download your free copy of How to Market Yourself Online a PDF eBook which contains all my best tips on internet marketing, social media and blogging.