How to create a PDF

[owen mt61554681]

How do I create a PDF

[try67]

That's a very general question... In principle, you open Acrobat and then go to File - Create and select the file you want to create the PDF from. If you want further help you'll need to specify what you wish to achieve, exactly.

[Dov Isaacs · Accepted solution]

To give a more complete answer …

For application programs such as Adobe InDesign, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, CorelDRAW, and QuarkXPress, you are best off opening your document in that application and then directly either exporting or saving as PDF, depending upon the application. This will generally give you the optimal PDF (with various options based upon desired usage of the PDF file) that you can get.

For Microsoft Office applications Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, there are two preferred options, both entailing opening the document in its respective application. If you have Adobe Acrobat installed, you should save as Adobe PDF. If you don't have Adobe Acrobat installed, these applications do have a native, albeit somewhat dicey native PDF creation feature (known bugs with use of OpenType CFF fonts among other issues).

For other applications running on MacOS, you can generate a PDF file directly from the Print dialog using MacOS' native PDF creator (this is not preferred if above methods are available).

For other applications running on Windows, if you have Adobe Acrobat installed, you can create PDF by printing to the Adobe PDF PostScript printer driver.

We would not recommend the method suggested above, i.e., “open Acrobat and then go to File - Create and select the file you want to create the PDF from.” Depending upon the file type, this could yield major issues in terms of fonts, linked graphics, etc. since for some file types such as InDesign, the file is uploaded to a cloud service which does not have access to your fonts and linked graphics. In the general case, you really need to open the document that you want a PDF copy of in the document's native application and create PDF from there using one of the options specified above!

          - Dov