The Acrobat.com Blog

Raise your hand if you knew Acrobat.com allows you to create PDF files, with the first 5 documents coming for free. You didn’t? Well, go ahead and try it out. And it’s not just Microsoft Word documents that can be converted – there are many other file types we support. If you’d like a jump start on conversion, check out this tutorial on acrobatusers.com.

As your file is being converted by our service, and not on your own computer, there are a few things that need to be considered to ensure that the PDF file creation process goes as smoothly as possible. We know you have 52 other things to do before the end of the day, so I hope these tips help you get that important document converted to Adobe PDF quickly and reliably using Acrobat.com.

Where there’s a will (or a printer driver), there’s a way: converting document formats that are not directly supported
So you have spent all your evening hours working on that impressive document, only to find that it’s in a format that isn’t supported by Acrobat.com Create PDF. What can you do? Well, your first option is to see if your application can export to one of the supported formats. But have a look at the results you get first, as things may change, depending on your software’s capabilities. If all looks good in the exported version, you should be good to go to create a PDF file online. Another option, which is especially useful if you have more complex layouts, is to “print” the document to an Adobe Postscript print file (.ps), which can be converted by our service. There are a few configuration steps you’ll need to take in to account before you do that, but it’s all documented for you here, and it’s free.

You didn’t want that image looking like mud, did you?
Document authoring applications such as Microsoft Word give you the option to embed or link to an image that you place on to the page. If you chose “embed” you should be OK when using the Acrobat.com Create PDF service. However, if you chose “Link to” (or similar, depending on the application) and then you upload the document to Acrobat.com for conversion to PDF, the Create PDF service doesn’t have all the image data it needs to include it in the PDF file. So what you get is a PDF with images that won’t look as good as you originally intended, or images that are missing. So, the general rule is to make sure you embed all your images.

That custom font you downloaded, while impressive, may not give the results you expect
The Acrobat.com Create PDF team try their best to support as many typefaces as possible. But if you have used a font that the Acrobat.com online services don’t have access to, or can’t use due to font vendor licensing restrictions (which you are adhering to, right?), then the resulting PDF file may not look as you expected. All you can really do here is to use a more readily available typeface in your documents.

Making sure you can actually upload the original file
This is a somewhat obvious one, but worth re-stating: check to make sure your file is in one of the supported formats and versions for the Acrobat.com Create PDF service. Keep in mind that the document needs to be less than 100MB in size. And although we run anti-virus software on our online services when you upload a file, you should always run the latest anti-virus software scan on your computer, to make sure your original source files are free of any malicious nasty stuff.

As always, if you have any suggestions for the Acrobat.com services, including Create PDF, you can send them to acrobat.com_feedback@adobe.com or post them to the Acrobat.com Ideas site.