New PDF Guidelines

James Fritz

To make it easier and faster to get quality results in PDFs created from Office applications, the Ghent PDF Workgroup (GWG) has issued new best practice process guidelines. The new guidelines were developed in response to recent changes made to Office applications and the Adobe Acrobat family of products.
The new Office Printing PDF Creator Guidelines are available for free download.
Says Menno Mooji, co-chairman of the GWG Office Document Printing Subcommittee and a founder of ISI Publishing Innovators, “With the software changes in Microsoft Office Service Pack 2 and Adobe® Acrobat 9, new ways of creating predictable PDFs are now possible. As a result, we’ve released a document outlining best practices that cater to the new developments.
“The Office Document Printing Guidelines recommend a predictable PDF workflow between Office product users and print providers.”
The Guidelines cover:
* Image Quality & Color
* Fonts
* Transparency
* PDF Creation Tools for Microsoft Office
* Creation of PDFs from other applications (using Adobe PDF Printer and Jaws Creator)
* Considerations for processing PDFs
All of the Guidelines have been created and tested by the GWG Office Document Printing subcommittee.
“When creating PDFs from different applications for professional printing, it is critical to maintain the integrity of the original file in order to ensure it will print exactly as intended,” Leonard Rosenthol, GWG Office Document Printing Subcommittee co-chair and PDF Standards Architect for Adobe, explains. “Different components such as images, color, fonts and more within office documents can be affected when you create or convert the document to a PDF file. It is important therefore to use proven ways to create a PDF.”