Adobe® Acrobat® 9 PDF Bible

Chapter 7. Converting Files to PDF

Unlike almost every other computer program, Acrobat was never designed to support creating new files and editing pages to add content. Where Acrobat begins is with file conversion to the PDF format. Users start with a document authored in another program and the resulting document is converted to PDF using either tools from within Acrobat or tools or commands within programs that support PDF conversion from native documents.

With Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Pro, and Acrobat Pro Extended, the number of methods you can employ for converting documents to PDF is enormous. Any program file can be converted to PDF through a number of different methods offered by Acrobat, operating systems, and many different authoring applications. The method you use to convert a document to PDF and the purpose for which the PDF is intended require you to become familiar with a number of different options at your disposal for PDF file creation. This chapter begins a new part of the book entirely devoted to PDF creation. In this chapter you learn basic PDF conversion methods available in Acrobat Pro and Acrobat Standard. The following chapters in this part cover more advanced PDF creation methods.

For easier reading in this chapter, I'll refer to Acrobat Pro (Windows and Macintosh) and Acrobat Pro Extended (Windows only) simply as Acrobat Pro. Where a different feature is exclusive to Acrobat Pro Extended, I'll so state that the feature is exclusive to Acrobat Pro Extended. ...