Do you remember the prediction of "paperless offices"? It was made as early as 1975 in Business Week magazine and was repeated often during the early days of the personal computer in the 1980's. However, with the advent or word processors, laser and ink printers, photocopiers and fax machines we appear to have more paper than ever before despite the development of e-mail and the campaigns to save our environment and use less paper to save trees.
Adobe's Acrobat PDF file format can greatly reduce our dependence on paper. It is a file format that has been around for years. It is based on Postscript, the printer language that is preferred by graphic designers, because it can render any image. PDF is supported on most computer platforms and preserves the look and feel of the original document. Many applications and forms are available in PDF format
I have encouraged the Alumnae Association staff to use a program from Macromedia (now Adobe) called FlashPaper. It came bundled with Contribute, the tool we use to edit the pages on the Association web site. Anything that can be printed can be outputted as a PDF file. Fortunately, you do not need to purchase FlashPaper to do the same thing. If you have a Macintosh, printing to PDF is built into the OS X operating system. For Windows users, you can download a free open source program called PDF Creator. Here are the features which include some capabilities that FlashPaper does not support:
- Create PDFs from any program that is able to print
- Security: Encrypt PDFs and protect them from being opened, printed etc.
- Send generated files via eMail
- Create more than just PDFs: PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PCX, PS, EPS
- AutoSave files to folders and filenames based on Tags like Username, Computername, Date, Time etc.
- Merge multiple files into one PDF
- Easy Install: Just say what you want and everything is installed
- And the best: PDFCreator is free, even for commercial use! It is Open Source and released under the Terms of the GNU General Public License.
