You’re working on a project you need printed and you’re using the best tool at your disposal. If you are a graphic designer, that may mean something fairly common like InDesign or Illustrator, or something a little more unusual like Swift Publisher. If you’re not familiar with those programs, you may be using Microsoft Word or Apple’s Pages app, but these days the common ground all these applications share is that they finally all speak one language when it comes to saving or exporting a file for sharing with others…and that file format is PDF.
A Brief History
PDF is short for “Portable Document Format,” and was developed as a way to present documents without having to worry about what program made them or what platform they were created on. You may remember that back in those days, there was a massive difference in the quality of files produced from a Mac versus Windows machine.
I was surprised to see that the PDF format went all the way back to 1993. I recall hearing about the format in the late ‘90s. Even then the format was very good, but still had some strange inconsistencies. The print shop that I worked in at the time would take a PDF, but we preferred a “native file” (PageMaker or QuarkXpress or Illustrator) when we could get it, just because it was very difficult to fix PDFs in pre-press at that time.
Improvements
Over the years the quality and stability of PDF files continued to improve. Different specifications were made and the file format became an accepted standard in the print and graphic design industry. At one point it even became a native file format for Adobe Illustrator, meaning that a designer could save to PDF directly in that program, rather than save as an EPS or AI file. That also signaled that it would be easier to open and make changes to PDFs using Illustrator.
It also became evident that PDFs could carry high quality images at lower file sizes, which made the format fantastic for emailing for proofs or printing.
Finally, while many “design-friendly” programs supported exporting to PDF for decades, Apple really changed the game in the early 2000s when their new OS X operating system including “Save As PDF” as just part of the standard “Print” dialog box for every program. Suddenly it didn’t matter if the application provider supported the functionality, if they allowed pages to be printed, you could “print” to a PDF. It wasn’t too long after that that versions of Microsoft Office started being produced with “Export to PDF” built-in on Windows, as well.
All PDFs Are NOT Created Equal
Even though practically every program can output to the format, though, it doesn’t mean they all do it well. Depending on the print driver selected when you export a PDF file, the quality can be good or bad…resolution high or low. Other settings may affect whether fonts are truly embedded in the file or not.
When I export a PDF from InDesign, I have different presets that allow for “Smallest File Size” or “Press Quality” PDFs, depending on whether it’s for a proof that I’m emailing or the file I’m sending to the printer. Most non-Adobe programs don’t have that kind of selection available so I’m going to offer two pieces of advice.
First, if your program DOES offer that kind of option…use it! It’s better for a print shop to have too much quality than too litter. Now, having low-resolution images at the beginning, then exporting a high-end PDF file doesn’t mean the images will magically get better…but the high-end PDF will protect the integrity of the great-looking graphics you do use. Sometimes the result is a very large file size…which is what Dropbox, Google Drive, and other cloud storage options are for.
Second, if your program DOES NOT offer output options, it’s not a bad idea to send the native (or “working”) file to the print shop, too. If there’s a way to package the file with fonts and external images, do that as well! Macs allow you to take a whole folder of native file, images, fonts, etc. and archive it into a Zip file, often reducing file size enough to email. WinZip and other software does the same thing on Windows. Again, sending everything through a cloud-storage file transfer service isn’t a bad idea.
Hopefully you’ve found this helpful. If you really want to get into the details of what a PDF is, check out this Wikipedia article.