Portable Document Format (PDF) files are one of the most useful ways to output documents for electronic viewing. Any PDF document can be easily read by anyone using any computer platform. PDF documents maintain their appearance because they do not rely on fonts and other aspects of the system on which they are viewed. Under Mac OS X, PDFs are a native file format. You can create PDFs from within any Mac OS X application, and you can read PDF files with the Preview application. NOTE
Creating PDF FilesCreating PDF files is an extremely simple task:
TIP You can use Automator or other macro tools to create PDF workflows. You can add these to the PDF menu by choosing the Edit menu command. Use the resulting window to add workflows to the PDF menu. After you do so, they will be available to you on this menu. One thing to note is that creating a PDF in this way does not create or preserve any hyperlinks in a document. For example, if you create a PDF of a web page, the links on that page will not be functional. Similarly, if you create a text document that contains a table of contents in which the entries are hyperlinked to the sections in the document, the resulting PDF will not contain active links. Basically, creating a PDF using the Print command simply replicates a paper document without adding any features of an electronic document. Even so, being able to create a PDF from any document using the Print command is useful when you want to send your documents to other people. TIP Creating a PDF version of a document is also a great way to capture versions of that document at specific points in time for archival purposes. To create PDFs that contain hyperlinks and other electronic document features, you need to use a more sophisticated application. For example, Adobe applications can save documents in PDF format and preserve hyperlinks within those documents. Or, you can use the full Acrobat application to create more sophisticated PDFs from any application. Viewing PDFs with PreviewTo view the document you created, open it. Unless you have configured PDFs to open in a different application, Preview launches and you can view the PDF.
To learn how to use Preview, p. 658. TIP Because Adobe Reader enables you to take advantage of all the features PDF documents offer, you might want to designate it as the default application for all PDF documents so it opens automatically when you view PDFs.
To learn how to associate file types with applications, p. 201. |