New media
All about PDFs
By J.D. Lasica
Ourmedia
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To open the PDF, use your browser (which will likey have the appropriate plug-in installed) or download the free Adobe Reader.
Professors, graphics professionals and authors often like them because PDFs give the creator control over the look and design of reports, flyers and other documents, regardless of which operating system or browser a recipient uses. State and federal agencies, such as the IRS, now routinely use the PDF for forms and printable reports.
PDFs can also enhance interoperability. A student could take elements from almost any source -- such as a Microsoft Word doc or an Excel spreadsheet -- mix them together, save the file as a PDF and send it to a friend who can open it without owning Word or Excel.
Detractors, however, point out the format's shortcomings: PDFs are not indexed by search engines; PDFs can be made into read-only documents with text that cannot be copied; word searches in PDF documents can be difficult; clicking on a PDF link often requires a separate program to launch, and PDFs crash browsers on some machines. (In fairness, Adobe Reader does allow most users to use a Select tool to copy and paste text. Another Select tool represented by a camera icon allows a user to draw a rectangle around any part of a page or image for copying and pasting.)
To create a PDF, you could use Adobe's Acrobat Standard ($299) or Acrobat Professional ($449). Or you could turn to a lower-priced program. For example, Macintosh users can create PDFs with the Pages program, part of Apple's iWork suite ($79). PC users may use ABBYY PDF Transformer ($100) as well as other PDF-creation tools.
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