I used to have a jazz band. I was in charge of the sheet music, making sure everyone had the most up to date versions of their parts. There are some very nice computer programs that make music notation as easy as word processing, like Finale and Sibelius, but keeping track of all the printouts was a nightmare. Like most jazz bands, we had a lot of substitutions in our lineup, and we couldn’t always get everyone together in the same place before every gig. It would have been super convenient to be able to just email all the pertinent charts out to everyone. However, only one other person in the band had the same notation program as me, and he had a different and incompatible version.
This isn’t just a problem for exotic software like Finale and Sibelius. Any user of Microsoft Word has experienced format headaches trying to share a document between different computers. You work hard on your document, and then you send it off for someone else to read or print, and the fonts come out all screwed up, or the graphics run off the page, or the screen just fills with gibberish. Even if you and your recipient are both using the same version of Word, all the vagaries of email systems and operating systems and printers can easily bork your careful formatting.
Fortunately, a wonderful solution exists. Jesse the computer-savvy trumpet player shared it with me, and I’m going to share it with you. Any program that prints can also create these handy files called PDFs. You can rely on a PDF to display and print the way you want it to on any computer in the world. Here’s how it works.
Normally, when you print a document, the computer converts it to a file in special printer language, and then sends this new file off to the printer. But instead of sending the file to the printer, you can have the computer save it as a Postscript Document Format, named for the widely used Postscript printer language. You can read and print PDFs from any computer using one of two pieces of software, both of which are free. Adobe, inventors of the PDF format, have this thing called Acrobat Reader, with its unfortunate and mystifying name. Acrobat Reader works okay, but it’s the bait for a marketing hook to get you to buy Adobe’s non-free software, which gets to be a pain. Mac users also have the choice of Skim, which is non-commercial, open-source and delightful. Both Acrobat and Skim display and print your PDFs the way you want them to, regardless of the underlying hardware and operating system.
So here’s how to make a PDF. When you go to File -> Print, tucked away in the corner of the dialog box is a little pulldown menu labeled “PDF”. Click it and choose the “Save To PDF…” option. Now you’ll get a “Save As…” dialog box asking where you’d like to save your PDF, and what you’d like to name it. Now you have a file suitable for e-mailing, posting on the web or whatever.
It’s a shame that this superbly useful tool is buried in the Print dialog where you wouldn’t think to look for it, instead of in the more obvious Save dialog, but whatever. The PDF trick is available in every program that prints. Use it in good health.
Tags: compatibility, file formats, internet, msword, pdf, scrivener