All PDF’s are not alike
Posted by Dave Robertson on Thu, Feb 04, 2010 @ 10:05 AM
The accelerating trend towards sharing and distributing construction documents online requires people who do so to be more aware of what the technology issues are that relate to the process. A very common issue we see is the misunderstanding of document formats and what they can do. The most common format we see for digital construction documents is PDF. It is a raster format which essentially means it is just an image with no particular ‘intelligence’ unlike a vector format like DWG which has all kinds of potential functionality and information embedded in it.
Portable Document Format (PDF) is described in Wikipedia as “a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout 2D document that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector graphics which compose the documents. Lately, 3D drawings can be embedded to PDF documents with Acrobat 3D using U3D or PRC and various other data formats”.
What is important to recognize about PDF documents is that they are not all created equal. Neither are they all displayed equal. Bad English but I hope you get the point. There are many ways to create PDF documents such as from the full version of Acrobat, a conversion from Word, a scanned image, or even something like a fax machine can produce a PDF. Each of these has the potential to be slightly different, which is where the potential problems arise. It depends what you are using the PDF for and how you are viewing it. For example, if you are sharing it over the internet or in email it is important to properly manage the size for the file. Some of the more sophisticated methods of producing PDF’s or the features that Acrobat allows such as embedding graphics or working with layers can make the files exponentially larger than a simple ‘flattened’ version of the same image.
There are some simple techniques and tricks that can dramatically help with making sure your image files are appropriately prepared for the purpose intended. It may not be a big deal for a few pages but if you are preparing a full set of drawings and specifications for a project it would be best to get it right. Otherwise, the people you are sharing them with will find it very difficult to work with them and you will be back spending time to sort it out. If this is an issue for you and you would like some assistance with how to properly manage or convert files for the internet we would be happy to help. Just email or call and we will help you optimize your PDF’s.