Working with PDF Documents.

I have addressed the benefits of PDF documents in earlier posts, but thought it might be time to add a few more thoughts.

For years now, the firm has used PDF Xchange Editor, and its predecessor PDF Xchnage Viewer as the preferred program for PDF documents.  Some of you may still opt to use Adobe Reader or some other third party program to do the same thing.   If all you ever want to do with a document is read it, or perhaps print it, then pretty much any program will do.  Even the Chrome browser has the ability to let you read an print a PDF.

Benefits of a PDF Editor:

PDF Xchange Editor, however, lets you do so much more than a simple viewer.  You can:

• mark up a document, 
• make notes on it, 
• attach a virtual sticky note,
• highlight or strike out text, 
• add or remove pages from a document, 
• add or remove images from a page,
• add watermarks, 
• add bates stamping, 
• redact text, 
• add a signature, 
• and a host of other things.

The PDF format is not really meant for editing documents that still need changes to text or layout, but you can make some limited changes even there.

Making a Document Easier to Use

Many people have express frustration when they cannot copy and paste text from a PDF.  Typically, this has to do with the way the document was created.  Many PDF documents, are generated using a "print to PDF" or similar feature that retains the text of the original document as text.  This allows a viewer to copy and paste the text into another document.  It also has the benefit of making the file size of the document much smaller.

Other PDF documents are created in such a way that the text is not captured. Scanning a document is the most common way to create this sort of PDF.  In effect, the computer is taking a picture of the document and embedding that image into a PDF.  So instead of actual text, the page is a picture of the text in the original document.  If you try to highlight the text, it won't work as you are simply putting your cursor over part of an image.

Fortunately, PDF Xchange Editor offers a solution to this.  If you get a document that has imaged text, you can use the OCR feature in Xchange.  OCR stands for ocular character recognition.  The computer looks at the image and recognized the words in it.  It then saves those words as part of the document so that you can use that text however you like.

The OCR feature may take a while to run, depending on the length of the document and the power of your CPU processor.  A document that is thousands of pages long may take hours to OCR, so be aware of that.  Shorter documents, though, likely only take a few minutes.  Once you have run the OCR and saved the document again, the document will retain that information for future use.

Controlling Your Document Sizes

I frequently hear from frustrated attorneys and staff about difficulties emailing documents that are beyond the 25 MB attachment size limit in Gmail.  How can a few dozen pages go over the limit when you sometimes receive documents that are hundreds of pages long and well within the limit?

The answer is that the way you create a document can GREATLY affect its size.  To demonstrate this, I created a sample document that was 19 pages long.  In WordPerfect, the document was only 61 kb (that's roughly 0.06 MB).  At that rate, I could get nearly 8000 pages into a document that would be under the 25 MB limit.

But we often want to convert a document to PDF.  When I used the "publish to PDF" feature in WordPerfect, the document size grew to 104 kb.  It is larger, but still plenty of room for thousands of pages. Rather than use the "publish to PDF" I made a new PDF using the bioPDF printer that lets you create a new PDF from any program.  BioPDF was more efficient and created a new document that was 90 kb.  BioPDF also does a better job of stripping out metadata.  This not only saves on size, but can also help you to keep data related to the creation of the document from the recipient.

Next, I printed out my document and then scanned it from a network copier.  Scanning will always drastically increase document size because it turns the text in the document into an image.  Images require much more space than text.  It also makes the document less useful because you cannot do word searches, or copy and paste text from the document.  My scanned file increased the document size to just over 1.1 MB (1142 KB).  The document size was 12.7 times larger than the one I created using bioPDF.

Using a network copier to scan document is not even the worst method.  Scanning on one of the desktop scanners most of use have at our desks is an even worse way to go.  The desktop scanners use a less efficient compression tool for the images.  So, in addition to taking a much longer time for the scan to complete, you also end up with a much larger file.  I scanned my test document on a HP Laser Jet 1536 printer/scanner as a black & white document and at 200 dpi.  The same document as before had now ballooned to about 8.6 MB (8595 kb).  This one 19 page document is now roughly 1/3 of my Gmail attachment limit.

Even worse, I scanned the document a second time as color and 300 dpi.  This was not necessary as the document itself was simply black lettering on white paper, but the scanner must use more space just for the possibility of of color.  In this case, my document was almost 11.3 MB (11,253 KB) or almost 1/2 of my Gmail attachment limit for a single 19 page document.  It is also more than 125x the size of the same document created with bioPDF.

Desktop scanners are a convenience if you are doing a small scan, such as a letter or a receipt.  If you have larger documents, even 10 or 20 pages, it makes more sense to scan from the network copier, or send to Reliable.  Your documents will end up roughly 1/10th the size you get on the desktop scanner.

If you are starting with an electronic version rather than just paper, a much better option is to use the print to PDF function using bioPDF (or its predecessor BullzipPDF - or any other PDF printer you might have). This will almost always create the most efficient PDF document you can get.

If you already have document in electronic format, printing it out and then scanning is about the worst thing you can do.  You create a much larger document, and have a less useful document.

Some people prefer to scan because they want to sign a document, then scan the whole document with the signature. Rather than do this, I recommend keeping a scanned image of just your signature on your computer. You can import this image into a WordPerfect document, then print to PDF.  Another option is to add your signature as a custom stamp in PDF Xchange Viewer or Editor and simply add your signature to an existing PDF document.  Either method will keep your document MUCH smaller than printing and scanning the entire document.

In summary, when creating a PDF, use a print to PDF method.  Using network copier/scanners are bad and using your desktop printer/scanner is really bad.