The seventh and final method for creating a PDF file is to create it from an Adobe application. And this is quite a bit different than the methods that I’ve shown you previously. In that, the Adobe applications essentially have Acrobat built in to them. So for example, In-Design Photoshop Illustrator, they all have a little bit of Acrobat in them and they can use it to produce a PDF file directly. Let me show you what I mean.
I’m going to jump over to the folder, the Lesson Four folder, and in there, there is a subfolder. The name of the subfolder is Times the Treasure Proposal and if I open that up, I’ll see that I have an in-design file there. This file is something that you’ll have so if you have In-Design, you can do this as well. I’ll open it and it will open in the In-Design, and here we have it. Now this is a sort of a standard graphics file. It’s designed to be a brochure, and it’s got some photographs and a logo and some type that’s been styled. This is something that I want to convert to PDF either because I want to proof it, or maybe I want to submit it to my printer. I can if I like. Choose, File, Print and then from the Printer option, just like I can with any other product on the planet, choose Adobe PDF. But I don’t need to do that so I’ll hit Cancel, because as I said, the Adobe applications have Acrobat sort of built in to them.
To get to a PDF file, I’m going to choose File, Export and I’m going to export a PDF file directly. From the Export dialogue box, I’m going to choose Save as File Type, Adobe PDF. I’ll click Save, and I’m confronted with a large dialogue box of choices which really isn’t unusual. Graphics professionals like to have these choices and they like to control the process completely. But every single time I generate a PDF file, I don’t want to have to look at these choices because they can become overwhelming, so I’m going to hit Cancel, and show you that from within In- Design, I can also choose File, Adobe PDF Presets, and if you’ll remember in the PDF Maker functionality inside Word, PowerPoint, Excel, I was able to do the conversion settings, choose the kind of PDF file that I wanted to make. That’s the exact same choice that I’m making here, so in this case I want to produce the smallest file size version of this because I’m going to use it for proofing. I’ll select Save, and I see the dialogue box now but because I chose the particular preset, I don’t need to go in and interact with every single bit and piece in here. I can if I want to so I can look at the compression, I can look at the output, but I don’t need to, so I’m just going to leave it on general. I’m going to kind of avert my eyes and quickly click Export. In-Design will take over. It will generate a PDF file directly without actually having to have Acrobat on board. In fact, there are some In-Design users who only have the free Adobe Reader.
If you want to see that file, I’ll drop back over to Acrobat and I’ll choose File, Open, because it might be useful to see the results. I’ll click on Times the Treasure Proposal and click Open and there we have it, a PDF file created directly by In-Design through the Export function. It’s the same kind of PDF that I could generate by choosing File, Print, except that I created it in one step from within In-Design.
There you have it, seven different ways to produce PDF files. And actually there are probably some other ways that I didn’t cover here but the seven ways that I showed you were the ways that you’re most going to want to produce a PDF file. Remember that every time you produce one, you get to control the process and you should because you want to make a PDF file that meets your needs and not just some set of default needs that come with the applications.
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