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JH Consulting

Creating PDFs

Creating PDFs for print
     Setting up PDF bookmarks

Save as PDF

Select PDFWriter driver

Create PDFs using Distiller
     Undocumented change

Creating PDFs for print

There are three ways to create PDFs:

For creating formal PDFs, use the Distiller method, but for casual-use PDFs, the Save as PDF method, or PDFWriter, is good enough.

Setting up PDF bookmarks

To add bookmarks to the PDF, you need to create the PDF using the Save as PDF or the Distiller method. Using the PDFWriter does not allow you to generate bookmarks. Bookmarks also increases the PDF file size especially if the PDF is large.

You set up the bookmarks in the Framemaker files before creating PDFs. When the PDF is created, the bookmarks are automatically generated in the PDF.

To set up the bookmarks:

  1. Open the Book window.

  2. Open File menu-Print Book.

    Or, you can also do this by opening the Format menu and select PDF Setup.

    You'll notice that in the File-Print method, the entire book is selected.
  3. In the Print Book dialog box, click on the Generate Acrobat Data checkbox and click on PDF Setup.

  4. The PDF Setup for Selected Files dialog box opens to the Bookmarks tab.

  1. Click on Generate PDF Bookmarks.

  2. In the Include Paragraphs text box, click on arrow button to include the paragraph tags you want to make bookmarks. Or, shift-click on the arrow to clean out the text box. You can select a paragraph tag in the text box and make the bookmarks indent.

  3. Structure tab--do not generate a logical structure.

  4. Document info--you can enter document info if you want.

  5. Links tab--create named destinations

  6. Click Set when done.

  7. In the Print Book dialog box, click Print. Make sure the Print to File checkbox is checked.

  8. This generates the postscript file. Find this file in Explorer and double-click on it. Distiller runs and creates the PDF.

Save as PDF

  1. Open the file or book.

  2. Open Format-PDF Setup to set up the bookmarks (optional). Define your bookmarks.

  3. Select File-Save and from the pulldown list Save as type, select .pdf. You can remove the .fm or .book.

  4. Click on Save. The PDF is created and placed in the folder you are working in.

Select PDFWriter driver

  1. Open the file or book. No bookmarks can be created when you use the PDF Writer method.

  2. Select File-Print and select the Printer Setup.

  3. From the pulldown printer list, select Acrobat PDFWriter as your print driver. Click Okay. If you see a message that the font information on your system has changed, click Okay.

  4. In the Print window, click Print. The PDF is created and placed in the folder you are working in.

Create PDFs using Distiller

Using the Distiller method gives you more options in which to control the resulting PDFs.

  1. Open the file or book.

  2. You can create a PDF for the entire book (default), or you can select files in the Book window.

  3. In the Print window, click on Print Setup and select Acrobat Distiller for your printer driver, and click on Print to file. If you see a message that the font information on your system has changed, click Okay.

  4. If you want bookmarks included in the PDF, click on Generate Acrobat Data. To setup bookmarks, click on PDF Setup. I use the following settings: turn on bookmarks, turn off structure, leave Document Info blank, and uncheck the Named Destinations box. Click Set when done.

  5. There is no useful purpose to creating a logical structure as yet, the Document Info is used for PDF searches which we don't use, and the Named Destinations links aren't needed and unchecking this reduces the PDF file size.

  6. Click on Print. Open Explorer and find the postscript file you just created.

  7. Open Distiller from the Start/Programs Menu. Drag the postscript file from Explorer to Distiller.

  8. If prompted, enter the name and location for the PDF. Distiller creates the PDF file.

Undocumented change

If you find bookmarks from the TOC and index included in the book PDF, you can correct this by overriding the bookmarks at the book level. If this doesn't work, then open the TOC and index files in your book and set the bookmark settings to include no paragraph tags. Bookmark settings at the book level are supposed to override individual file settings, but this doesn't always work. They made this change in Frame 6 to allow for individual bookmark settings in each file in the book, but this can create some conflict. This is an undocumented change.


JH Consulting
mrycove419@yahoo.com
Last modified: January 2003
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