Web Design in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition

Adobe Acrobat

The commercial application for creating PDF files is Adobe Acrobat, which is in Version 7 as of this writing. Acrobat gives publishers the greatest control over PDF creation, including the ability to make interactive PDFs, a single PDF from multiple documents, electronic signatures, and other advanced features that you don’t get when simply printing to PDF.

When Acrobat is installed on a computer, PDFs can be created from within Adobe, Microsoft Office, and selected other applications at the click of a button. In non-Adobe applications, such as QuarkXPress, the document is printed to a PostScript file (choose File instead of Printer in the Print dialog box) and then converted to PDF using Acrobat Distiller, part of the Acrobat package.

Once the PDF file has been created, it can be opened in Acrobat for further fine-tuning and advanced settings. See the Adobe web site (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/main.html) or the Acrobat documentation for more information on creating and fine-tuning PDF files.