Acrobat for Legal Professionals: AdobePDF Print Driver vs 1-button PDF Creators: Which to use?

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The views expressed in this blog are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Adobe Systems Incorporated.

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January 21, 2006

AdobePDF Print Driver vs 1-button PDF Creators: Which to use?

You're in Microsoft Word. You can create an Adobe PDF file using either the:

AdobePDF Print Driver
1-button PDF Creators installed by Acrobat in Word's toolbar

Which should you choose and what is the difference?

Two Ways to Make PDFs

In the early days of Acrobat, the only way to create a PDF was to "print" to the Adobe print driver. This captured the print output of any program and created a PDF.

You can still do this today. Simply go to the Print Menu and select the AdobePDF print driver from any application:

Beginning with Acrobat 6 and extended in Acrobat 7, however, Adobe offers add-ins to popular applications to make creating PDF easier:

Acrobat Standard	Acrobat Pro
Microsoft Word	Microsoft Word
Microsoft Excel	Microsoft Excel
Microsoft PowerPoint	Microsoft PowerPoint
Microsoft Outlook	Microsoft Outlook
	Microsoft Access
	Microsoft Visio
	AutoDesk AutoCad

For example, the add-ins to Microsoft Word look like this:

The official name of the Adobe add-in to Office is "1-button PDF Creator", so we'll refer to it that way.

More than a button's difference . . .

The 1-button PDF Creators do more than automate selecting the AdobePDF print driver for you.

Using the 1-button PDF creators allow the user to create more robust, more useful PDFs:

	Office Add-in	AdobePDF Print Driver
Create a PDF	X	X
Control PDF Version	X	X
Add Security	X	X
Tagged PDF for Accessibility	X
Create PDF Bookmarks	X
Convert Hyperlinks	X
Convert TOC to PDF Links	X
Convert Cross References and Footnotes to Links	X

You can control the Office add-ins by choosing Change Conversion Settings from the Adobe PDF menu in each of the applicaitons.

Bookmarks, links and so on make the PDF easier to navigate for the user. I covered tagging and accessibility in a previous article.

Looking at the PDF Conversion Settings in Word

You may wish to change the PDF Conversion Settings in Word to better suit your workflow. Below are a few tips and techniques that I reccomend for my legal customers.

To change PDF Conversion Settings for all future work sessions in Word, make changes without a document open, then quit Word.

Recommended Settings

1) Deselect Convert Document Information.

As mentioned in my article on Metadata, virtually the only metadata passed through from Word to PDF is the information in the Title, Subject, Author and Keyword fields. By deseleting this option, only the document title is passed through.

2) Security Tab

If you'd like to ensure that every PDF you create is encrypted, you can set that in this tab. Some firms set usage restrictions on every PDF sent outside the firewall.

Posted by Rick Borstein at 09:25 AM on January 21, 2006

Comments

Mike Smick — 12:55 PM on January 21, 2006

I was just trying this with Open Office and Microsoft Word. I was printing to the printer driver from MS Office so I could make a PDF of a different page size. 8x8. But I could not get the settings to take. The content would always show up on a 8.5x11 sheet. So I opened the doc in Open Office and exported the oddly shaped doc with Open Office's built in export to PDF, and I succeeded.

RICK's REPLY: Works fine for me if you use the 1-button PDF Creator in Word. You have to fiddle with three different settings if want to use the AdobePDF print driver.

Al Lemieux — 08:22 AM on January 24, 2006

I find that using the print driver creates smaller PDF files. Why is that? InDesigns export to PDF feature, in particular, creates very large PDF files.

RICK'S REPLY:
Using the 1-button PDF Creators and direct export from Adobe products creates a richer PDF. Tagging, bookmarks, hyperlinks, form fields, etc. do add to the file size. You turn off most of these options if you would like to make a smaller file.

Shea Reinke — 09:12 AM on March 23, 2006

If you want to find information in the help files or at the Adobe website you will find the "1-button PDF Creators" are called as a group the "PDFMaker" component.

Jonathan Franklin — 06:47 PM on April 04, 2006

I'd love to use the PDF creator, but it has never worked for us on the more recent SR packages from Microsoft on Office. Is there a work around or fix for this? It always wants to requires us to run repair on Acrobat, but still NEVER works.
--- Rick's Reply---
Try this: http://www.adobe.com/support/techdocs/331273.html

Acrobat for Legal Professionals