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CREATING PDF DOCUMENTS

The creation of Portable Document Format (PDF) documents is essential for the electronic filing component of ECF; it is the only format that the application accepts. This document format was established by the Supreme Court of Florida, Administrative Order No. AOSC04-11, Technical Standard 1 – Document Format.

There are two primary methods for creating PDF documents: formatting text documents into PDF at the time of creation or scanning imaged documents from paper into PDF. The format method offers at least four significant advantages over the latter.

Reduced Labor: Imaging is a labor-intensive task.

Improved System Performance: Text documents are much smaller than imaged documents. For a typical document, its PDF text version would be on 20% of the size of its imaged version. Therefore, whenever an imaged document is stored or viewed, it puts five times more load on the network than it would as a text document. It also takes five times as long to transfer.

Reduced System Storage Cost: An imaged document consumes about five times more storage space than it would as a text file.

Text Search Capability: Text [computer generated and printed to PDF format] documents can be searched for words and phrases. Scanned or Imaged documents cannot be searched without first performing an extra step called optical character recognition (OCR). OCR is labor-intensive and does not yield 100% accuracy.

Creating PDF Documents from a Word Processing Package

The optimal method for creating a PDF document for filing in ECF is a simple method: create it from a word processing application using Adobe Acrobat’s PDFWriter. PDF files created in this way have two advantages: they are much smaller in size than documents that have been scanned and they are text-searchable.

Adobe Acrobat

Adobe is only one of many PDF software products on the market. The Clerk of Courts is in no way endorsing Adobe Acrobat. Any PDF creation software will be sufficient.

PDFWriter

PDFWriter is part of the Adobe Acrobat package. This is a preferred tool for use in creating a PDF document from a word processing application because it:

• creates a file that is smaller in size than a scanned document
• creates a file that is text searchable
• converts the document more quickly than Distiller [see below]

To ensure that the formatting and appearance of the document remain the same when viewed through the word processor and when viewed or printed through the PDF reader, the printer (File/Print menu) must be set to “Acrobat PDFWriter” before beginning to compose or edit the document. If a document is initially prepared with some other printer specified, the ultimate conversion to PDF is very likely to introduce changes in pagination, fonts, spacing or other formatting elements, requiring further proofreading and editing. Once the document is saved as a PDF file, always print from the PDF reader (rather than from the word processor) to be sure that the printed copy matches the Clerk’s official copy.

If Adobe Acrobat PDFWriter is set as the default printer, no other steps should be necessary. If another printer is set as the default, Acrobat PDFWriter must be selected as the current printer immediately after opening the word processor [or immediately after choosing to create a new document]. In WordPerfect, each time the document is opened for editing before the final version is ready to be filed, the printer should be set again to Acrobat PDFWriter. In Word, Acrobat PDFWriter is retained as the printer until the Word application is closed. If only the document has been closed and reopened, the printer will still be set to Acrobat PDFWriter.

WordPerfect

WordPerfect versions 9, 10, 11 and 12 offer a feature [“Publish-to-PDF] that allows a document to be printed to PDF. It has been noted in the past that printing to PDF through WordPerfect created an unusually large document. Although improvements have been made in the size of the file created, the same file created by PDFWriter is substantially smaller. If you have embedded images in your document, you might want to consider using PDFWriter to provide a smaller more manageable file.

Microsoft Word

Currently there is not a feature in Word that will provide a PDF converter. However, the PDF files created in Word using the File/Print to Acrobat PDFWriter method and the File/Create Adobe PDF are nearly identical I size.