Why turn in assignments in PDF?

There are many reasons why it is convenient to turn in your papers electronically rather than on paper. Quite apart from saving trees, this means you can turn in papers from anywhere and anytime. On my end I receive your work instantly, with all its pages intact, and with a timestamp that makes clear that you have completed your work on time. I also automatically have a copy of your paper for future reference (end-of-term comments, recommendation letters, etc.). And we can both keep backup copies of your work on our own machines or on other servers, where it won’t be lost even if both your computer and mine die.

Many students first think of turning in their electronic papers in the format they produce them in: this is usually some version of Word (.doc or .docx), or sometimes an alternative word processor (WordPerfect, Pages, OpenOffice), or occasionally the RTF interchange format (actually also created by Microsoft, but used by Apple’s TextEdit as well).

These many formats create problems. If I don’t have the program to read your document myself, I have to convert it. Worse yet, if I can’t convert your document on my computer, I have to go find a computer with the appropriate program. This makes me crabby. You don’t want me crabby while I evaluate your work. Microsoft Word is particularly liable to produce this problem, since there are many versions of its software and Microsoft is constantly changing how they work. The company is particularly badly behaved when it comes to file formats: every version of Word produces differently formatted documents (including Mac and Windows versions of the “same” program), and there is no guarantee that one version of Word will understand the output of another version perfectly. When Microsoft moved to the docx format, the problems got even worse, as many programs that used to work well with Word documents became useless; some have still not fully caught up.

Eventually I will crack your word-processor-format file—but the results are not completely reliable. So you have no guarantee that the carefully laid-out paper in a lovely font that you have produced corresponds to what I see on my screen or print out on paper. In particular, if you use a font I don’t have, chances are good the results of conversion will be unattractive. And if you have accented or other special characters, there is a chance they will come out as garbage if there problems with so-called “character encoding.”

Portable Document Format is the solution to these problems. A PDF file specifies typography and layout quite precisely: you can assume that any modern computer will display and print a PDF file in the same way, with the same fonts, lineation, page breaks, layout, and so on. The PDF “embeds” the fonts you use, so there is no question of what you type appearing as something else on another computer. As a bonus, most PDF readers not only display PDFs but allow anyone to annotate them: and these annotations, too, will translate smoothly from platform to platform. Contrast this with the chancy business of trying to annotate documents with Word’s commenting or Track Changes functions: that is best attempted only if the other person is using the same version of Word. This way my comments on your work are also archived electronically in a reliable way.

Reading annotated PDFs from me

If you submit a PDF file of your paper, I will return my comments to you in the same format. In particular I will add marginal comments to the paper itself. These will normally appear as little “speech bubbles” in the margin. In some PDF viewers (e.g. Mac OS Preview) the associated comment will appear in the margin of the PDF window. But in Acrobat’s Adobe Reader you may have to find a “View Comment/Annotations” menu item (probably in the View menu) in order to see a list of comments which you can scroll through.

Producing PDF files

All you need to know, then, is how to get your word-processed documents into PDF. You cannot do this simply by changing the file extension from .doc to .pdf. That will only confuse me and my system. The conversion process is normally very easy, but it depends on your operating system and on your word processor of choice.

MacOS X

MacOS X “speaks” PDF natively: any program that lets you print also lets you save PDFs. Choose “Print…” from the File menu, and click the “Save As PDF…” button in the resulting dialog box.

Certain programs also have their own specific PDF export functions; in some cases this will produce documents with extra bells and whistles (like hyperlinks or clickable tables of contents) or give you finer control over the output. For example, Apple’s Pages has an “Export…” menu item (again under the File menu). But for purposes of turning in papers you normally don’t have to worry about this.

Windows

Word 2010 knows how to create PDFs; choose “Save As” from the File menu, and select PDF from the pulldown menu of types. See these PDF exporting instructions from Microsoft for all Office 2010 programs.

If you have Word 2007, you can install an Add-In from Microsoft called Save as PDF or XPS. This plug-in adds a “Save as PDF” item to your File menu.

A complete Adobe Acrobat installation, found on some cluster or library computers, enables you to produce PDFs in many ways. (Few students will want to invest in their own copy of Acrobat at more than $100 for the student edition). The Acrobat program itself happily converts many formats to PDF. Acrobat also adds a PDF export feature to Word (in an Adobe toolbar) and, in some installations, you’ll also get a virtual “PDFWriter” printer. When you enter the print dialog, you should be able to choose PDFWriter from the pulldown menu of printers; this generates a PDF file. Note that installing Adobe Reader does not get you these features.

Alternatively, you might try the free PrimoPDF utility. There are also several free print-to-PDF utilities available, all of which create a virtual printer to produce PDFs from your print dialog:

Linux and friends

OpenOffice and its cousins have an Export To PDF menu item.

If you use LaTeX, then you can use pdflatex (or xelatex) to create PDF documents natively.

If your document-processor can produce postscript output (and really it should: how else are you printing?), then you can always run the resulting file through the ps2pdf converter included in the widely-available ghostscript.

Embedding Fonts

“Embedding fonts” is the process that ensures that I will see exactly what you see when I open your PDF: the PDF contains information about your typefaces, even if I don’t have the same fonts on my system. Unfortunately, Microsoft’s programs do not always embed fonts as they should. In order to ensure that any PDFs you export from Microsoft Word have all necessary fonts embedded, follow these instructions, prepared by Andrew McDonnell of Miami University of Ohio.