To get to the Adobe PDF settings, or to get to the place where you can control the Adobe PDF settings, select Settings, Edit Adobe PDF Settings, and that brings up the dialogue box for doing so. Now this dialogue box is a whole bunch of knobs and we’re going to work on turning those knobs to fine tune the process of creating a PDF file. It’s important before I get into this to help you understand that we’re not actually going to be creating a PDF file during this portion of the lesson, we’re just going to learn how to set Acrobat up so that it will create a kind of PDF that I’m looking for. And there’s a lot of advice that I have to give you so I’m going to try and focus on those things that will help you understand what you all need to do to create the kind of PDF you want.
The knobs are broken down into six panels – General, Images, Fonts, Color, Advanced, and Standards. And again, these are just groupings of knobs that you’re going to use to set Acrobat Distiller up, to produce the kind of PDF file you’re looking for.
So let’s start with General because it’s the first place you’re going to want to start. And the first most very basic thing that you want to ask yourself about the PDF that you want to create is, “Who’s going to be looking at the file?” That’s going to help you determine the compatibility setting.
Acrobat’s been around for an awfully long time. Acrobat Eight though has just been released. It’s a good bet that not everybody out in the cloud of potential Acrobat users will have the free Reader Aid and so you want to think about that when you produce a PDF file. In fact, if you want to be as compatible with as large a number of people as possible, choose Acrobat file from your compatibility setting. Now you might be wondering what you’ll lose in a case like that. There are things that Distiller Eight can do that Acrobat Five could not do. For example, if I choose compatibility to Acrobat Eight, the object level compression options that I have are different. There’s more of them, and we’re not going to get into the depths of what the object level compression does for you. So if I set to say that when I return to Acrobat Five compatibility, the maximum option goes away. If you want to learn more about any of the aspects of these knobs that are available in these panels, you can always click on the Help button, and there is a very robust description of each and every piece of the puzzle.
But again, there are some things that I tend to gravitate towards and I do want to point out, for example, resolution. Now if you’re familiar with the concept of resolution, and it has to do with the number of pixels in, say a photograph, the more pixels you have, the larger the file and it seems logical that you would reduce this if you wanted to create a smaller file. But that’s not actually what this resolution refers to. This resolution refers to the number of lines in a circle. Now, ‘wait a minute”, you might be thinking, “circles don’t have lines, they’re circles”. Well, on the computer, a circle is actually a series of very teeny tiny lines and the higher the resolution, so 24 hundred dots per inch, the smaller those lines will be, and the less like a stop sign your circles or curves or other objects that are curving in the PDF file might look. So if you want to reduce the file size, you can reduce it by a negligible amount by reducing this number, say down to 600 but I would strongly discourage going any lower than that. In fact I tend to typically leave it at about a thousand unless I know I’m going to a full blown printing situation in which case, I’ll set it back to 24 hundred dots per inch.
The only other thing in General that I want to definitely point out is Optimize for Fast Web View. This is going to do two things. First off, it’s actually going to reduce the file size because what it does is it creates referencing within the document. That’s just geek speak for, if you’ve got a photograph used in the document in one place, and then several other places also, it only stores that file in the PDF file once, and then refers to it all of the other times. It means that it doesn’t have to have the same photograph over and over and over again in the document. That’s a god way to reduce file size. The other thing that it will do is, if you post PDF files on the web so that someone can view them within the browser, it will make it so that that object only has to download to the user’s browser once. Every other time that they go on and hit that particular object, it’s already there, so it’s going to speed up and improve the experience of someone who’s looking at your PDF file through the web.
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