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Document Preparation with Acrobat

SFU IT Services // Mike Sollanych

Introduction This document is a follow-up to a presentation, available separately, designed to educate users on the

proper ways to prepare a PDF for maximum effectiveness. This document adds specific procedures for

accomplishing the preparation tasks promoted in the presentation. For a general overview, referring to

the presentation would be best.

Table of Contents Introduction .................................................................................................................................................. 1

The Five Principles of PDF Preparation ......................................................................................................... 3

Requirements ................................................................................................................................................ 3

More Information ......................................................................................................................................... 3

Creating Readable Documents ..................................................................................................................... 4

Clear Formatting and Layout .................................................................................................................... 4

Direct PDF conversion ............................................................................................................................... 5

Microsoft Word 2010 – Save As PDF .................................................................................................... 5

Adobe Acrobat Pro – Print to PDF ......................................................................................................... 6

Mac OS X built-in PDF printing .............................................................................................................. 6

CutePDF and other free tools ............................................................................................................... 6

Scanning Documents to PDF ..................................................................................................................... 6

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) ........................................................................................................ 7

OCR methods available at SFU .............................................................................................................. 7

Applying OCR to a Scanned PDF with Acrobat Pro ............................................................................... 8

Creating Navigable Documents ..................................................................................................................... 9

Bookmarks ................................................................................................................................................ 9

Creating Bookmarks (Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 – Windows) ...................................................................... 9

Best Practices for Bookmarks ............................................................................................................. 10

Clickable Table of Contents ..................................................................................................................... 10

Creating Links ...................................................................................................................................... 10

SFU IT Services Document Preparation with Acrobat

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Creating Accessible Documents .................................................................................................................. 12

Document Structure Tags for Accessibility ............................................................................................. 12

Run the Accessibility Checker ............................................................................................................. 12

Adding Tags ......................................................................................................................................... 12

Reviewing the Reading Order ............................................................................................................. 13

Adding Descriptive Text to Images ..................................................................................................... 13

More Accessibility Information ............................................................................................................... 13

Creating Transportable Documents ............................................................................................................ 14

Optimizing a Document .......................................................................................................................... 14

Determine if Optimization is Necessary ............................................................................................. 14

Saving an Optimized PDF .................................................................................................................... 15

Applying a Smart File Naming Convention ............................................................................................. 16

An Example Smart File Naming Convention ....................................................................................... 16

Creating an Annotatable Document ........................................................................................................... 17

Saving with Extended Features for Adobe Reader ................................................................................. 17

Summary ..................................................................................................................................................... 18

Questions / Comments ............................................................................................................................... 18


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The Five Principles of PDF Preparation The following five principles were identified as important steps to preparing a PDF for maximum

effectiveness. Properly prepared documents are:

1. Readable

2. Navigable

3. Accessible

4. Transportable

5. Annotatable

Each of these steps will be described in detail in this guide.

The process is time-consuming at first, but once you’re familiar with it, it will be second nature to

prepare a document for distribution. As more people begin to use these procedures, the quality of

digital documents at SFU will improve. Thanks for doing your part to help!

Requirements In order to use the techniques in this guide, you’ll need a PC or Mac with Adobe Acrobat Pro installed.

There are no specific system requirements for your computer, but please note that some of the

processes described in this guide are processor-intensive and will take a long time to run on an older or

slower machine. If you experience this, contact your local IT staff.

Adobe Acrobat 9 for Windows will be used for the procedures shown in this guide. Other versions will

vary, but the fundamentals will be the same. If you have difficulty following the procedure on a different

version, try using the built-in Help feature to search for what you’re trying to do, or use Google – be sure

to include the version you’d like to search for.

More Information If you find this document to be incomplete, or require a more in-depth description of any of the

processes within, please first contact your local IT staff to see if they can offer assistance with a quick

clarification. If that’s not possible, contact the author of this guide, Mike Sollanych, at [email protected]

with a detailed description of your situation.

mailto:[email protected]


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Creating Readable Documents A readable document is one that is designed with clear formatting, has a logical layout, uses modern

typefaces, and is transferred into PDF form with the maximum possible quality.

Clear Formatting and Layout It’s beyond the scope of this document to describe the process for designing a clear, easy-to-read

document; some of the process is an art, and some of it is technical. We can, however, recommend a

few Best Practices:

Use the Built-In Formatting Styles

Wherever possible, especially in Word 2007 and Word 2010, use the built-in formatting styles (headers,

titles, emphasis, etc) rather than directly applying font sizes, bolding, etc. to text. If you use these styles,

you’re telling the word processor a lot more than just “make these words bigger” – you’re telling it

“these words are a section header”, which it can then use to generate a table of contents automatically.

You can also really easily change the entire theme of the document by selecting from the built-in style

sets, and all of your formatting will instantly be updated to the new style.

Use modern typefaces (fonts)

With the release of Word 2007, the old standbys of Arial and Times New Roman were replaced with the

updated Calibri (sans-serif) and Cambria (serif). These typefaces are better designed for display on-

screen, while retaining excellent printed readability. We recommend designing your documents around

these, rather than just going with the familiar.

On the other side, don’t abuse typefaces! Comic Sans and the like may seem ‘fun’, but they’re actually

much more difficult to read, especially for a full page of text, and can cause eye strain. Stick with simple

fonts, even for your headers, and use the ‘fun’ ones sparingly.

Include navigational hints

Including page numbers, section numbers, headers, and footers in your document is highly

recommended. These features offer a lot of information at a quick glance that make it easier for

someone to know what they’re reading and where they are in the document. Remember, your PDF may

be read on a phone, tablet computer / iPad, laptop, or printed out on paper; depending on how you’re

distributing it, the end user may even only have a few pages extracted out of the middle!

Including contextual information will ensure that even in the worst cases, people know what they are

looking at, and where they might start looking for a better copy.


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Direct PDF conversion Optimum image quality in PDF is possible only when directly converting a document into PDF. A number

of methods exist to handle this conversion, and they’re listed here in order of preference.

Microsoft Word 2010 – Save As PDF

If you are running Word 2010, you can save any document directly as a PDF using the File -> Save As…

command. Simply choose PDF from the file type list as seen here:

Once you’ve selected PDF, click the Options button, and ensure it looks like the dialog below:

If the document has been designed using the built-in Heading formatting

features, found on the Home ribbon, the document’s structure is actually

already encoded in the perfect format to bring across into the PDF. Just

turn on Create Bookmarks Using: Headings and PDF bookmarks will be

created automatically.

Including Document Properties and Document Structure Tags for

Accessibility will save you time later when preparing the PDF for

accessibility.

Lastly, the Bitmap text when fonts may not be embedded checkbox should

be clicked – this ensures that your typographical choices will be included in

the document even if their license agreement doesn’t include the right to

embed the entire font. However, you should always be using fonts that

permit embedding, as the output will be much higher quality and the PDF

file size will be smaller.


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Adobe Acrobat Pro – Print to PDF

If you have Adobe Acrobat Pro installed on your computer, you’ll find that it creates a “virtual printer”

that you can send documents to from any program. This results in high-quality output that certainly

rivals Word 2010’s built-in export, but it lacks the document structure features listed above that will

save you preparation time.

Mac OS X built-in PDF printing

Mac OS X features a built in PDF printing tool that works across all applications. Simply click the PDF

button at the bottom left of any printing dialogue box and choose the Save as PDF… option.

CutePDF and other free tools

If you do not have Adobe Acrobat Pro, or a Mac, and need to produce PDF output from a program that

doesn’t have its own built-in PDF exporting function, CutePDF is a good free option that will produce

good-quality output. Other free tools exist – ask your local IT staff to provide you with something they

support.

Scanning Documents to PDF If documents must come from a paper origin, and there is no way to get an original, digital copy of the

document, scanning is the only option. It is best to scan at a fairly high resolution - we recommend a

minimum of 300 dpi, but not more than 600 in most cases as a point of diminishing returns is reached

quickly.

Some multifunction devices feature an option called “searchable PDF”, which is essentially a built-in OCR

program. OCR is described in more detail later in this guide. If your copier has this feature, we highly

recommend using it!

For smaller documents, use of local desktop scanners and multifunction devices (photocopiers) is

sufficient. However, for longer documents, or those that need to have as close to perfect quality as

possible, we recommend that you contact SFU Document Solutions to arrange for them to handle

scanning for you.

When working with Document Solutions, it is possible to have them help out with some of the

organizational parts of the process. For example, if a document is to be split into several sections, you

can provide them with a spreadsheet containing the file names to be applied to each section. It’s

worthwhile to sit down with the team to determine if they can automate anything else for you.


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Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Not all text is the same! When you scan a document, without any further post-processing, it will just be

a “picture” of text. Just like words on a sign in your vacation photos, this text isn’t something you can

directly work with – you can’t copy and paste it, you can’t easily highlight it or correct it, and there is no

way to search through it easily.

Many PDFs that are distributed from scanned sources remain in this format. They’re perfectly readable

for most users, but their usefulness beyond basic readability is low. Perhaps more importantly, such

documents are completely useless to visually impaired and blind people, because the special software

they used to read text out cannot describe such a picture to them!

In order to improve on this state of affairs, you need to turn this scanned picture of text into real digital

text that can be copied, corrected, and searched. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software handles

this, by carefully analyzing each scanned page, breaking it down into disparate symbols or ‘glyphs’, and

comparing them to massive tables of known characters to figure out what character each one looks

most similar to.

For documents printed and scanned on modern equipment, using clear typefaces, the process is

virtually perfect. Faxed documents and old documents printed on aged equipment will not fare as well,

and documents in poor condition will be even worse, but modern software does a surprisingly good job

at figuring it out even in the worst conditions.

We recommend that all scanned documents be put through an OCR program in order to increase their

usability.

OCR methods available at SFU

At SFU, there are three ways of OCR’ing a document:

Scanning your document on a Konica-Minolta multifunction copier with the Searchable PDF i-

Option installed.

Having your document scanned at SFU Document Solutions.

Using Adobe Acrobat Pro to OCR the document after it is scanned.

The first two methods are outside of the scope of this document – contact your local IT staff or

Document Solutions for more details.


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Applying OCR to a Scanned PDF with Acrobat Pro

To OCR a scanned document in Acrobat Pro, click the Document menu -> OCR Text Recognition ->

Recognize Text Using OCR. This will result in a dialog like the following:

Generally, you’ll want to select All Pages in the Recognize Text dialog. Ensure that the settings are

similar to those shown – the PDF Output Style should be “Searchable Image”, and 600DPI is a safe

downsampling level (we don’t want to lose too much quality!)

Click OK and the process begins. It may take from ten seconds to a minute per page depending on your

computer’s performance. If you’re applying OCR to a hundred-page document, now is a good time for a

cup of coffee.

Once the process is done, you can check on it by trying to select some text, copying, and pasting it into a

program like Notepad or Word. If you’re able to do that, and the text you paste comes out correctly, the

OCR has done a good job. If not, you may need to tweak the Recognize Text settings, or (more likely) re-

scan the document.


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Creating Navigable Documents A navigable document is one that’s easy to get around! As mentioned earlier under the Best Practices

for creating a Readable document, formatting cues are valuable to help make a document easy to

navigate. However, with a PDF, we have a few extra features that are outside of the document itself that

can help us navigate more easily.

All of the processes in this section assume you’ve already created a PDF using the techniques above,

have digital text (either via direct PDF or OCR), and have opened it up in Adobe Acrobat Pro to prepare it

for distribution.

Bookmarks Bookmarks in a PDF are similar to bookmarks in your web browser. They’re saved alongside the

document, and each bookmark simply points to a particular page view. When you make a bookmark

inside Acrobat Pro, it simply saves the page position (down to the top visible line of text).

Bookmarks can be hierarchical – this is perfect if you have a document with long sections, as you can

create a bookmark for the section itself at the start of the section, and inside of this bookmark you can

nest further bookmarks for the subsections.

If you save a PDF from Word 2010 directly as described earlier in this guide, bookmarks will be created

for you automatically. If you are creating a PDF from another program, or from a scanned source, you’ll

need to make them manually.

Creating Bookmarks (Adobe Acrobat Pro 9 – Windows)

Click the Bookmarks icon on the left toolbar to display the Bookmarks panel, as shown below:

To add a new bookmark, scroll the document to the correct page, and then click the New Bookmark

button. To remove one, click the bookmark first, and then the Trash Can icon, or hit the Delete key on

the keyboard. Bookmarks can be moved around be clicking and dragging them up and down on the list;


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to nest one bookmark inside of another, drag and drop it on top of the bookmark you’d like to nest it

inside of.

Best Practices for Bookmarks

Always make a bookmark for the first page of the document (or, if there’s a title page, for the

table of contents page as well).

Don’t use too many bookmarks – you don’t need more than one per page, for example. Try to

keep the number to a happy medium where they add to the document and make it easier to

navigate, rather than inundating the user with too much text.

Clickable Table of Contents Another nice feature you can use to make your documents friendlier is to make the Table of Contents in

your document clickable. This means that when someone first pulls up your document, they can

immediately navigate to any section they like, without even being aware of the bookmark functionality

described earlier.

Depending on the device someone uses to read your PDF file – remember, it’s not always a desktop

computer, but increasingly a tablet or phone – the program they’re using may not make the bookmarks

into an obvious navigation feature. A clickable table of contents alleviates this problem.

The clickable table of contents is actually a subset of Acrobat’s linking feature, which allows you to

select any region of a document and define the behaviour of a click. The two most commonly used

modes of this tool are Go to a Page View, which creates a link within a document, and Open a Web

Page, which opens a browser to a URL of your choice.

Creating Links

To create a link, select the Tools menu -> Advanced Editing -> Link Tool. This will turn the mouse cursor

into a crosshair and make existing links in the document visible.

Next, drag a rectangle where you want to create a link - this is the area in which the link will be active.

When you let go of the mouse cursor, the Create Link dialog box is displayed:

In the Create Link dialog, select the Go to a Page View option. You can adjust the appearance of the link

if you like – by default, it is set to not show anything at all, but if you deem it appropriate, a visible


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indication of the clickable area can be a helpful cue to show readers that an area of the document is

active.

When you click Next, a small dialog box will appear advising you to scroll to the section of the document

to link to. This is where your bookmarks can come in handy – just click the bookmark that refers to the

section you want to link to, and the document will scroll there immediately. Then, click the Set Link

button:

This completes the link. Scroll back to the Table of Contents (you can use the bookmark you created),

and proceed to add the next clickable link.

When you’re done, you’ll have a document that’s easy to get around. Please remember that when

people are viewing your document for the first time on a tablet computer, phone, or laptop, they won’t

have the same awareness of where things are in the document that you’ll have after having looked at it

for so long.

The more you do to aid their ability to get around the document, the more they’ll get out of it.


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Creating Accessible Documents Once a document has been optimized for readability and navigability, the next step is accessibility. An

accessible document is one that has been prepared specially to be compatible with screen readers,

braille displays, and other systems that enable visually impaired or blind users to read.

In a PDF document, this is accomplished with three steps:

Ensuring the document has digital text (using OCR if necessary)

Adding document structure tags for accessibility

Adding alternate text to images.

Once all three have been implemented in your document, it should be as accessible as possible for all

users. OCR has been covered in detail earlier in this guide, so let’s focus on the latter two.

This section of the document only focuses on the absolute basics needed to make a document

accessible.

Document Structure Tags for Accessibility Behind the scenes in your PDF document there is a lot of extra information that is not normally

displayed on screen. For accessibility, we’re primarily interested in seeing the Reading Order – that is,

the order in which content is going to be read aloud by a screen reader.

Documents exported from Word as described earlier in this guide will already have these tags created in

a reasonable order. Other documents may not, so follow the procedure here to add them.

Note that your document must already be OCR’d prior to beginning these steps.

Run the Accessibility Checker

To check the document’s accessibility, click the Advanced menu -> Accessibility -> Quick Check. This will

analyze the document for you. If the document does not have any tags, it will inform you that the

document “is not a tagged PDF” or that it “is not structured, so the reading order may not be correct”.

If you receive this message, you will need to add tags to the document.

Adding Tags

Adding tags for a straightforward document is simple – click the Advanced menu -> Accessibility -> Add

Tags to Document. This will process the document and add tags where needed.

When it completes, Acrobat will display a report on the left hand side indicating the various levels of

confidence that it has for the document. Generally, anything Medium confidence or above is just fine;

for lower levels of confidence, you may wish to drill down into the report, which will also include

recommendations about how to help repair the document.

This report is also available by running the Full Check found in the Accessibility menu.


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Reviewing the Reading Order

The most common suggestion the report will have is to review the reading order for complicated pages.

Generally, the assumptions the Add Tags tool makes are correct, but for complicated areas of layout –

i.e. tables, multiple columns, etc – it may be necessary to adjust the reading order.

To do so, click the Advanced menu -> Accessibility -> Touchup Reading Order.

This will display a dialog box like the one on the right. Ensure the

Show Page Content Order checkbox is enabled, and you will see

numbers on each element on the page. You can then adjust the

reading order by clicking the Show Order Panel button and then

moving the various elements around until they are in the correct

order.

Adding Descriptive Text to Images

While you’re in the Touchup Reading Order panel, you can right

click on any image element on the page and select the Edit

Alternate Text item to assign it some descriptive text. This text

serves as a short, unseen description of the image, to be read aloud

to a visually impaired user. This can make all the difference for a

document that relies heavily on figures and images.

More Accessibility Information Additional accessibility functionality exists in Adobe Acrobat Pro that is not described here.

If you know in advance that your audience will contain users that need high quality accessible materials,

it’s worthwhile to take a look at the official Adobe guides for accessibility, found at:

http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat/training.html

http://www.adobe.com/accessibility/products/acrobat/training.html


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Creating Transportable Documents A transportable document is one that’s easy to distribute. This involves two primary steps:

Optimizing the document for minimum size and maximum compatibility

Naming the document with a smart naming convention

Optimizing a Document PDF files range from a few hundred kilobytes (small enough to fit on an old-style floppy disk) to

hundreds of megabytes (large enough to take up an entire CD-R). The file size of the document depends

on the number of pages, the quality of the images and text, and how well the document has been

compressed – a method of reducing the file size by trading off some quality. Luckily, most of that lost

quality is un-noticeable to the average user!

Determine if Optimization is Necessary

The first thing you need to do is to determine if optimization is actually needed for your document. To

do so, take a look at the file size of the document – you can do this using Windows Explorer / OS X

Finder, or if you’d like to do it inside of Acrobat, click the File menu -> Properties, and look for the File

Size value.

To help determine what that size actually means, here are a few rules of thumb:

1 gigabyte is 1024 megabytes; 1 megabyte is 1024 kilobytes. Kilobytes are tiny!

10 megabytes is the normal maximum for an emailed document.

700 megabytes is the size of a CD.

USB memory sticks can usually hold around 1 to 4 gigabytes as of this writing.

So, if your document is currently 12 megabytes, it’s certainly worth using the PDF optimizer to try to

sneak it under that 10MB email limit. Conversely, if your document is 5 megabytes, it’s likely not

necessary unless you know you’re emailing it someone who’s still using dial-up Internet.

If your document is more along the 700 megabyte size, you definitely want to use the optimizer to help

crush it down, but that kind of document is likely to contain a lot of high-quality images, of the sort that

you might not want to overly compress due to the loss of quality. So, be careful with the settings you

choose. If you’re not sure, ask an IT staff member, graphic artist, or similar person in your department.


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Saving an Optimized PDF

Before beginning this process, save your current document to ensure all of the work you’ve done up

until now is secure.

To optimize a PDF, all you need to do is use the built-in PDF Optimizer in Acrobat. Click the Advanced

menu -> PDF Optimizer. This will display a dialog like the following:

Start by selecting the Settings dropdown at the top left, and choose Standard to reset the options to a

sane default. Then, change the Make Compatible With dropdown to ‘Acrobat 7.0 or later’ – very few

machines are still running older versions of Acrobat Reader, and as the software (as well as many

alternatives) are free, there’s no reason to provide further backward compatibility at this time.

Next, choose the JPEG2000 compression options as listed above. Ensure the ‘Optimize images only if

there is a reduction in size’ checkbox is selected.

If the document features high-resolution colour photos, or is destined for print, you may wish to skip the

PDF optimizer, or at least turn the Quality dropdowns shown above to High and the ‘ppi’ (pixels per

inch) value to 200 or even 300.

When you click OK, the document will be saved out to a new file (you’ll enter the name), and you will be

working on the new version. The original you saved stays as-is with full quality intact. Take a look at the

optimized copy, especially in photographs, and determine if the quality is sufficient. If it is not, re-open

the original, and use more conservative optimization settings.

Once you’re happy with the output, review the file size information again to see what kind of a drop

you’ve gained. In some cases, the size difference can be substantial!


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Applying a Smart File Naming Convention Once you’ve got an optimized document, the next step to making it transportable is to give it a good file

name. Traditionally, file naming is a fairly ad-hoc process – people often name a document just after its

title, or develop their own naming convention that they may adhere to with varying levels of strictness.

SFU IT Services encourages you to sit down with your department staff and come up with file naming

conventions that you can stick with for a longer period of time, across multiple authors. A good file

naming convention adds a lot of meaning to a document, making it easier to find in a large file

repository. It also carries meaning with the file once it has left its canonical home on a repository and

been distributed out to users and devices.

One of the hallmarks of a smart file naming convention is that it should be sortable. We can’t assume

much about the capabilities of the devices people choose to read documents on, but one of the few safe

assumptions is that files will be listed in alphabetical order. We can take advantage of this to make

documents sort themselves into a logical order.

An Example Smart File Naming Convention

This is a file with a smart name:

DEPT – 2011-10-22 – 01 – Introduction and Agenda [S022].pdf

Each section is separated with a space, a dash, and another space for readability.

Breakdown:

DEPT – the departmental acronym

2011-10-22 – the date, in Y-M-D for sorting

01 – an ordinal, to put the day’s documents in order

Introduction and Agenda – the descriptive name of the document

[S022] - a pre-existing document number, perhaps from a legacy system

When multiple documents employing similar naming conventions are placed in the same folder – which

is often the case when end users download a lot of documents and don’t spend the time needed to

organize them into folders – these documents will sort perfectly into departmental sections, ordered by

date and then the order they should be read in.

Naturally, you’re free to come up with your own variation on the theme – but remember, the

documents you create may be living alongside the documents someone else creates using this same

advice, so don’t deviate too far from the suggestions here or the potential benefits to this approach

being used across multiple departments won’t be realized.


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Creating an Annotatable Document At this stage, you’ve got a readable, navigable, accessible document that you’ve optimized and saved

with a good file name for transportability. Essentially, the document is done and ready to go!

However, if you send the document out in the current state, end users won’t have all of the functionality

we’d like to give them. By default, PDF files created with Acrobat Pro are limited so that users who only

have Adobe Reader, the free PDF reading program, can only read them and can’t add annotations.

There’s an extra step you’ll need to take when saving the final copy of the document to ensure they can

add all the annotations they want.

Saving with Extended Features for Adobe Reader Under the Advanced menu, select “Extend Features in Adobe Reader”. In some versions, this may be

called “Enable Commenting and Analysis in Adobe Reader” under the Comments menu.

This will offer a confirmation box as shown above, and then it will save a new copy of the document.

Don’t save over your original, as various editing features will be disabled once you save this copy.


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Summary At this point in the guide, you should have a readable, navigable, accessible document that’s optimized

and prepared for transport in an annotatable form. It’s a lot of work for one document the first few

times through, but eventually it will become second nature.

To speed up the process, encourage others to send you digital copies wherever possible. As you’ve seen,

the Word 2010 export feature is presently the fastest way to prepare a PDF for distribution – using it lets

you skip half the steps in this guide!

Even when starting with scanned content, we’re making a big difference in the number of prints we

produce and the amount of energy we use by switching to electronic distribution of documents.

Questions / Comments If you have further questions not covered by the content in this guide, or suggestions that you think

would improve a future version of this guide, please submit them to Mike Sollanych at [email protected].

Thanks for reading!

mailto:[email protected]