Format and Sharing...It's Not for the Seriously Paranoid

Let's be a little technical this week. How many years have we used PDF documents because we didn't want them to be editable? Well conspiracy theorists, the seriously paranoid, and those with dark secrets already know that they, PDFs, have always been editable documents. The rest of you normal types might not be so sure. The right answer is that anything electronic can generally be manipulated, but then again so can printed documents with a little Whiteout and a copy machine. The key comes down to what's easy and practical as much as anything else. Of course password protected documents of all kinds help with the non-edit ability and security issues, but let's not go there today.

First, a couple of terms to refresh ourselves:

PDF is "Portable Document Format". It was created in 1993 by Adobe and was and is designed to be viewable on any platform. Generally, there are two types of PDF documents - those created by sending Office files, images, etc. to an Acrobat like PDF printer and those created by scanning physical paper like pages of a book, legal documents, etc.

OCR is "Optical Character Recognition". It is the mechanical or electronic translation of scanned images of handwritten, typewritten or printed text into machine-encoded text. It is widely used to convert books and documents into electronic text files. Once the process is complete, you can handle the document like most other electronic documents...edit, search and print. OCR software is always improving, much like voice recognition. Studies have shown that because documents are being scanned more often, there is also an increase in the need for OCR as the documents need to be shared or re-purposed.

RTF is "Rich Text Format". RTF is a word processing format that works across platforms, Windows, Linex, and Mac. It was developed by Microsoft in 1987 to facilitate document exchange.
I had an opportunity to meet and see a demonstration of some of Adobe's capabilities a couple of weeks back. It really got me thinking how cool that program is and, even without fully using all of its capabilities, how embedded it has become in what we do.

But I digress...back to the whole idea of it being editable or not-editable. PDF's are always editable. It's just not automatically editable. So again, I come back to ease of use. We will all default to that which we need most often and which is the easiest to achieve.

Search the web and you'll find numerous programs that will handle the process of converting a PDF to an editable document for you...many are free. Of course, if you have Adobe Acrobat it has its own set of tools/software. Their Export feature handles this with ease. For a simple PDF to text it's just a couple of clicks. Now if you want to preserve some of the layout and other features of the document, you'll want to make sure you select through the available Text Options, which also let you handle images and maintain other "formatting".

What if you have a document that's in PDF format that needs major editing? The best idea is to convert it to Word format, and make your edits. Then create a PDF from that Word document. Not only does this strategy allow you to use the powerful features of each format, but it also allows you to edit and create high-quality customized PDFs using Microsoft Word.

So when to use PDF's and when to use .docs or some other word processing document? Many times it's not either/or. Many times the best strategy is one that incorporates the use of both of these formats. The Word format is clearly the best choice for editing and making changes to works-in-progress, while the PDF format is the preferred option for viewing and sharing documents. So most of us create and maintain an original document in Word format, convert to PDF when it's finished and we are ready to share it with others. In the world we work in, the ease of sharing, and repurposing is key to working efficiency and just getting things done!

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