Cherish and maintain your source document; dumb PDF is no substitute.
PDF has grown to be a very capable file format. Starting out as dumb "electronic paper," PDF is now also used as a smart authoring file format by many Adobe products. By smart, I mean that it perfectly preserves a document's structure. For example, you can create artwork in Adobe Illustrator and then save it as a PDF without any loss of information (File Save As... Save as Type: PDF). Open this smart PDF in Illustrator and continue editing; it functions just like Illustrator's native AI file format. Smart PDFs have beauty and brains.
|
Between smart and dumb, you have clever (or tagged) PDFs, which retain a loose sense of the original document's structure [Hack #34] . Screen readers and downstream filters can use this information to extract document text and tables from the PDF. The PDFMaker macro, which ships with Adobe Acrobat and integrates with Microsoft Word, can create clever PDFs [Hack #32] .
Smart, clever, and dumb PDFs have different advantages, but they all share the same, beautiful face. Each kind can represent your document with excellent visual fidelity. This makes it hard to tell them apart by sight and leads to some confusion.
Only a few applications can create smart PDFs. Adobe Acrobat is not one of them. Acrobat can create dumb or clever PDF, but it can't create a PDF that is clever enough to replace your source document. When using popular word processors like Microsoft Word, Sun StarOffice/OpenOffice, or Corel WordPerfect, PDF is not a substitute for the program's native file format.
|
So, cherish and maintain your source document. Dumb (or even clever) PDF is not a substitute. A good source document will reward you with HTML, handheld, and full-featured PDF editions. Process it to create derivative material, or easily apply new styles. As we shall see, your smart source document is pure content and should give you good service.
Meanwhile, dumb PDF remains perfectly suited for its original purpose: easy creation and distribution of great-looking electronic documents.
A smart source document promises great rewards. Creating smart source documents takes discipline. The trick is to separate the document's content from its presentation. We accomplish this by introducing styles, such as Heading 1, Body Text, and List Number. Styles separate content and presentation like so:
For example:
When you create a new paragraph, tag it with a style. In this case, we used Heading 1. The Heading 1 style, in turn, describes how all such paragraphs should appear. If you set the Heading 1 style to use the Bold, Arial Narrow font, all Heading 1 paragraphs in your document will be rendered using Bold, Arial Narrow. Without styles, changing the Heading 1 font from Arial Narrow to Times could involve selecting and changing every single heading paragraph by hand. Ugh!
The benefits of styles go well beyond rapidly changing fonts. You can also:
Create a dynamic table of contents
Create a full-featured PDF edition [Hack #32]
Create an HTML edition [Hack #35]
Create a handheld edition [Hack #36]
Generate derivative documents [Hack #55]
How? Styles give your content intelligence. When creating the full-featured PDF, Heading 1 paragraphs also become level-1 bookmarks. When creating the HTML edition, Heading 1 paragraphs are appropriately tagged <h1>. Styles give your content meaning, so downstream filters can interpret it properly.
When you create a new document in Word, you inherit a collection of styles from the document's template. If you did not specify a template, the normal.dot template is used as your document's template. How do you access these styles?
In Word 2002, select Format Styles and Formatting . . . , and a task pane opens on the right. If the list of styles looks too short, go to the bottom of this pane and set Show: All Styles to show everything. The list should grow to include dozens of paragraph, character, list, and table styles. At the top, as shown in Figure 3-1, it shows the style of your current selection. Change your current selection's style by simply clicking one of the alternative styles in the list.
In Word 2000 or Word:Mac, select Format Style to open a dialog that shows a list of available paragraph and character styles. Set List: All Styles to see everything. You can also use this dialog, shown in Figure 3-2, to change the current selection's style. After you change a style, the dialog closes. This is a cumbersome way to apply styles.
A better way to view and change paragraph styles in Word 2000 and Word:Mac is with the Style Area, shown in Figure 3-3. In Word 2000, select Tools Options View. In Word:Mac, select Word Preferences and select the View option. Set the Style Area Width, near the bottom of the dialog box, to 1" and click OK. Now, select View Normal or View Outline, and a column on the left will show you the style of each paragraph. Double-click a style name and the Style dialog box opens, enabling you to change the paragraph's style.
Writing a document using only styles takes discipline. Word makes it very easy to apply paragraph formatting outside of styles, so reduce temptation by closing the Formatting toolbar (View Toolbars Formatting), which is shown in Figure 3-4. After closing the Formatting toolbar, you can easily open the Style dialog by pressing Ctrl-Shift-S (Windows) or Command-Shift-S (Mac).
In most cases, you should change a paragraph's formatting by changing its style (e.g., from Normal to List Bullet) or by modifying the style's formatting (e.g., adding an indent to all Normal paragraphs). You can modify a style's formatting with the Modify Style dialog, which you can access in many ways.
From the Styles and Formatting task pane, available in Word XP and 2003 and shown in Figure 3-5, you can open the Modify Style dialog by selecting Modify . . . from the current style's drop-down menu. Or, in any version of Word, select the paragraph, open the Style dialog by pressing Ctrl-Shift-S (Windows) or Command-Shift-S (Mac), and then click Modify . . . . When using the Style Area, you can open the Style dialog by double-clicking the paragraph's style name. Then click Modify . . . to open the Modify Style dialog.
Finally, avoid using tabs, repeated spaces, or repeated carriage returns (empty paragraphs) to format your content. Instead, update the style's paragraph indents and spacing to suit your taste. Use tables for tabular data.
To create an automatic table of contents from your document's Heading styles, select Insert Reference Index and Tables . . . Table of Contents (Word 2002), or Insert Index and Tables . . . Table of Contents (Word 2000/Word:Mac).