Saturday, December 21, 2002
Word Documents to screen as PDF
Output to Acrobat PDF
When there is an absolute requirement to maintain the exact look of the MS Word document and still deliver on the web then the solution is to output to PDF [portable document format]. This is the standard format, created by Adobe to facilitate the transfer of documents for print and screen.
Learn about PDF on Adobe’s web site.
furthermore...
Maintaining the look of Word document A PDF document will look on the screen exactly as it would on paper. That includes the fonts, paragraph format, headers and footers. Hyperlinks within the MS Word document can be preserved and headings formatted with the document style sheet can be converted to bookmarks in the PDF.Designed for paper Readers of paper documents know that the next page is to the right, that there is usually a contents page at the front, and that page numbers are on the same place of each page. Documents delivered on screen as PDF will need, either to use the navigation provided by the Acrobat Reader interface, or interface elements will need to be designed into the content space. For examples of this see my Parish Package CDROMs. There are several ways to create a PDF from a Word document:PDF Maker for Word - Windows only - no MAC versionTo automatically create bookmarks in the Acrobat documents you can only use PDF maker within Word under Windows. Office (2000 or X) does not include this tool.Bookmarks These are a very powerful feature of PDFthat allow easy navigation, however, creating them can be tricky: On the MS Word side of things you need to be using styles to format your text and the text needs to be hierarchical with headings and subheadings. If you want users to navigate to specific locations such as diagrams or tables then these should be captioned or titled using a style or a heading.
MS Word can create a table of contents (TOC) page from these hierarchical heading and sub-headings, and the PDF maker will create bookmarks from that same table of contents. In other words, you should find that the resulting PDF includes a hyperlinked TOC AND a set of bookmarks that replicates the TOC.
The bookmarks will be displayed in Acrobat expanded, but it is possible to collapse the bookmarks, save the PDF and the next time it is opened it will remain collapsed until you click on the bookmarks with a > against them.Acrobat DistillerUsing the Acrobat Distiller to create PDFs from Word, does offer more control over compression of graphics and embedding of fonts, but this way will not give you the ability to automatically create bookmarks.
Create PDF online Adobe, as well as others are providing a service to create PDFs online from Word documents. These service are not generally free although Adobe do offer a free trial. I have used the Adobe service and the resulting PDF is certainly usable, however, as far as I could see there was little or no control over the output and certainly NO BOOKMARKS were produced. Check out Adobe's siteThe Acrobat Reader To view a PDFon the web, a plug-in for the Acrobat Reader must be installed. You can presume that the user has the plug-in or provide a link on the page to download the free viewer from the Adobe web site.The best way to create PDF for onscreen viewingThe best way that I have found to create Acrobat PDFs is to use Adobe InDesign as an intermediary from Word. The Word document can be imported into Indesign, preserving all the styles and formatting and then Indesign, gives a better sense of the final look of the document.
When outputting to PDF, the Indesign exporter give a lot of control, including the compression of graphics and the production of bookmarks from TOC. Hyperlinks from TOC and index can also be preserved.
Using a page layout program like InDesign or PageMaker or Quark Xpress gives much more control over the final document. Hoewver, all of the features found in these applications are not always required and may be too 'feature rich' for many document authors.Adobe HTML to PDF The full Acrobat program (4 and 5) has a very powerful feature that can be used to convert web pages to PDFs. This means that we could use a combination of techniques to get from Word to PDF: Word to HTML and then web page to PDF. This technique can bean advantage if using a web editing tool like DreamWeaver or GoLive at the web page stage.
I have used this technique with Excel spreadsheets to create PDFs of complex tables: Excel to HTML, then use Acrobat to convert the web page to PDF.You have been reading 'Word Documents to screen' on PagetoScreen.net
