jbl

I have been asked to send an attachment to an email as a PDF file. Apparently no other format is acceptable so what can be done with a PDF as a recipient that other formats prevent ?
Hope this makes sense !!

Cheers

JBL

Dedrater

Antivirus/firewall protocols, internal standards and copyrights.

The answer to your question is less.

No other reason.

jbl

Thanks.

JBL

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Also more standardised than say a .docx file (word 2006 onwards). Makes their job easier.

As there are lots of people who do not use, for example MS office. i.e those who use Mircosoft works...which by default saves in different formats to Office (.wps). Also older version of office (pre2006 IIRC) are incompatible with files from new versions.

Many formats are also not fully cross-platform compatible whereas .pdf files are, so those with linux/unix or apple OSs can easily work with the same file formats.

The true exception/alternatives is rich text format (.rtf), and comma sperated values (.csv) but these are considered massively outdated and highly restrictive in formatting and presentation in this day and age. Especially when the file needs to only be in a viewable only (non editable) format. Jpegs is an alternative, but its size isn't standardised causing issues with printing on A4 (and still being readable) and archiving. HTML and webscripts is obviously another, but that causes security risks and still not designed for printing.

There are free pdf creators if you need one. You don't have to fork out for a full version of Adobe. You can also get a pdf printer driver which will convert any printable file to a .pdf as if it were sent to a printer.

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Just to add Sage (software we use) generates its company reports in .pdf.

At one point (version 13 IIRC) they decided to use microsoft's version....mdi (Microsoft Document imaging format ).

It was crap. They switched to .pdf a year or so later.

I don't think even the current versions of MS office supports .mdi now.

Markus

One other thought as to why a PDF, the resulting file isn't usually editable. Granted you can use Acrobat Pro and edit some parts of a PDF, but I'd have thought far fewer would have PDF editing software installed than, for example, Word, and thus sending a word document could result in it being far more easily edited.

As has been said, it's a pretty standard cross platform format.

Twin Fields

As above.

When I email my customers invoices, (or quotes for that matter) I always PDF them so they cannot be altered. There would be nothing more annoying when you've got your own business than trying to recover monies unpaid, against invoices that don't match!

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

There's free pdf software that can get round any read-only locks on pdf files.

Not many people would go to that kind of effort though, but they could if they wanted to.

Twin Fields

Thankfully none of my customers are that dishonest, or I wouldn't deal with them.

jonc

If you have MS Office 2010, you can create PDFs from any of the main applications in the Office suite. Adobe have opened PDF source to the public for several years and there are numerous PDF editors that you can use, usually time trial limited, eg Nitro, Nuance, Foxit etc.

mart360

I knew a bloke whom i worked with some years ago who would turn everything he did into a PDF file.


He had this strange idea that everything he did could be changed by people, and by tuning it into a PDF made it difficult

Me, i send powerpoints and word docs as is, if people need to change them, so be it

Mart

ALi-B

iTrader: (1)

Therein lies the issues;

We don't use Microsoft Office of any form on any of our computers; Too expensive. And it kills the performance on the older computers (especially as they add increasing amounts of automatic updates - which then ties up internet bandwidth on what is a stretched 4MB connection when they all update together ). So we use Openoffice.

The problem is with Microsoft's docx format; Its not a industry standardised format, so they keep changing it!

Openoffice is ok upto office 2009, but on office 2010 MS changed the formats yet again (whilst keeping same file idetifiers)

Yes MS do provide their own document viewers to enable read only access, but they are bloaty and need one for each file type (one for word viewer, one for excel viewer, one for powerpoint viewer. none of which are that easy to find on the internet and they are pretty bloaty for just a viewer application (whereas adobe reader is a doddle, barring the ask.com toolbar ).

So if you ever send a file to someone who doesn't have the latest version of office or compatability packs (I do have office 2003 somewhere) or those poor souls afflicted with Microsoft Works, its better to save your files in a legacy format (such as .doc as opposed to .docx ) or stick it into a PDF.



On another plus note....we've recently archived all our client's company historic accounting data onto PDFs with the scanner and OCR (allowing text search). Eight large boxes full of paperwork and lever-arches now can be incinerated, and I can have my shelf-space back