On Windows, one of the most common programs used with Adobe Acrobat is Microsoft Word. Acrobat automatically installs a PDFMaker into Word, and you can use that PDFMaker to generate PDF versions of your Word documents.
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If your workflow includes merging documents on a regular basis, try out the Mail Merge to Adobe PDF feature, which merges database content with a Word file and converts the merged documents to PDF.
When your Word document is ready for conversion, save it and then click Convert to PDF on the PDFMaker 9.0 toolbar in Word, or choose Adobe PDF > Convert to Adobe PDF. Using the default PDFMaker settings, a Save As dialog box opens, displaying the same name as your Word document. Change the filename and location, if necessary, and then click Save to close the dialog box and convert the file.
Changing the Conversion Settings
The Standard conversion setting, the default used by PDFMaker, produces a PDF file that’s suitable for printing and small enough for easy distribution. To view or change the settings, choose Adobe PDF > Change Conversion Settings to open the Acrobat PDFMaker dialog box . You can choose an alternate group of presets from the Conversion Settings drop-down list, as well as changing other settings options as desired.
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After you specify the settings you want, PDFMaker keeps those settings until you adjust them again, which makes converting a Word document to PDF a quick process.
Regardless of the conversion setting you select, the Settings tab selections remain much the same. Most of the PDFMaker settings are common in all PDFMakers, although the application settings vary among programs (see the following sections for some details). Each PDFMaker installed into Microsoft Office programs on Windows includes settings specific to the program, either in separate tabs or as options on the Settings tab. In Word, you can convert content such as bookmarks and comments, as well as text.
Select the Word tab to display Word-specific options:
* To preserve comments in your converted Word documents, select “Convert displayed comments to notes in Adobe PDF.” Comments in the source document are listed in the Word tab. Use the options to configure the appearance of the comments.
* Choose the appropriate Convert option to preserve referencing work you have done (such as cross-references, table of contents, footnotes, and endnotes).
* Click “Enable advanced tagging” to integrate the tags for selected features into the converted PDF file.
The Word PDFMaker in Windows gives you three choices for generating bookmarks, depending on your document’s structure. Bookmarks are created from document styles or from headings you select from the default template. If you have bookmarks in the document, you can use them in the PDF document automatically. Open the Conversion Settings dialog box and select the Bookmarks tab.
The options on this tab let you do the following:
- Convert bookmarks you created in Word to PDF bookmarks.
- Convert Word headings by selecting/deselecting heading levels in the list.
- Convert specific styles by selecting them in the list.
NOTE
You can use the Security tab in the dialog box to add password protection to a file. If your document is being converted for further use in Acrobat, however, don’t add security at this point. Wait until the document is processed in Acrobat and then apply security settings. Otherwise, each time you open the converted PDF document, you have to input passwords.
Simple Settings
Here are some tips for working with the basic Settings options:
* Deselect “View Adobe PDF result” if you want to convert the file but don’t need to work with it in Acrobat immediately. By default, a converted document is displayed automatically in Acrobat. If you’re converting a large document or using a slow computer, deselecting this option can prevent some processing errors.
* If you consistently convert documents using the same name as the source Word document, deselect the “Prompt for Adobe PDF file name” option. Deselecting this option saves a step.
* Leave the “Convert document information” option selected, because you may need to use the information in Acrobat. It doesn’t affect the processing time or file size appreciably and may save time later.
* If you made changes to PDFMaker settings and want to revert, click the Restore Defaults button at the lower-left corner of the dialog box.
* The “Create PDF/A-1a:2005 compliant file” option isn’t found in all programs’ PDFMakers, and isn’t necessary except in those cases where you want to produce a file for long-term archival storage.
If you use styles or headings in your Word document, it’s much quicker to scroll through the list on the Bookmarks tab to check off the specific styles or headings you want to convert, rather than selecting a checkbox at the top of the dialog box and then deselecting the elements you want to exclude.
NOTE
If you make custom bookmark assignments on the Bookmarks tab in the dialog box, your settings are overridden if you then choose “Add bookmarks to Adobe PDF” on the Settings tab.