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Using PDF
PDF, Adobe’s portable document format, is useful for providing print format
documents over the web, and has the great advantage of retaining the formatting
of the original document, however, when using PDF, keep the following in mind:
- PDF documents are usually designed for printing, not for reading on-screen.
- Large amounts of printing may be a financial burden for students — it
may be useful to provide printed versions of documents as an alternative to downloading
and printing.
- PDF documents created from text documents are searchable and can be made accessible
for screen-readers, however PDF documents created from scanned pages lose these
attributes.
- PDF documents created from scanned pages are usually much larger than the
text-based counterpart.
- Copyright legislation applies to supplying digital material on the web. See
‘Copyright issues’.
It is possible to convert a scanned PDF into a text document by using OCR (optical
character recognition) software — however, this will lose the page formatting,
and usually requires some editing, as unusual characters my not be recognised.
It also requires that any graphical content must be re-inserted into the document.
See ‘OCR’.
Jakob Nielsen:
Avoid PDF for on-screen reading: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20010610.html.
The differences between print design and web design: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/990124.html.
For more information about the PDF format, go to; http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html
Online assistance with using Adobe Acrobat is available by searching the database
at Adobe Studio’s Tips & Tutorials: http://studio.adobe.com/tips.
> using OCR
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