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A Guide to Online Media

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File Format: Acrobat and the Portable Document Format

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format developed by Adobe Corporation. The primary purpose of a PDF is to allow a document to be transferred between any computer running the Acrobat Reader software. The file will look identical regardless of the platform it is viewed on. Because of the multiple versions of Acrobat Reader available, it is necessary to have a Reader that is of a equal or higher version.

In addition to formatted text, PDF files may contain images as well as hyperlinks that can be used as methods of navigating throughout the document. Another unique feature to PDF is that it allows the file to be copy protected to prohibit unwanted access.

Downloading Acrobat

The free Adobe Acrobat Reader is available for download from the Adobe website.

Select the language, platform that matches your operating system. Next choose the connection speed that matches your current Internet connection. Once all three selections have been made a download button will appear along with a few download options .

Be sure that "Download the full version of Adobe Reader" is selected." You may deselect any other options before downloading Acrobat for installation

Note: Pay versions of Adobe are available for download after purchase from the Acrobat main page.

Downloading PDF files

Typically, you can just click on the link for the PDF file and it will launch the Acrobat Reader from your web browser. But in some instances, you may receive the following link error:

If you are using Internet Explorer as your browser, you will need to download the PDF file by right-clicking on the link and choosing to "Save Target As":

If you are using Firefox as your browser, you will need to download the PDF file by right-clicking on the link and choosing to "Save Link As":

You can now choose to save the file wherever you like and then double-click it to open the PDF through Acrobat Reader.

Acrobat Products

• Acrobat Reader, is the program for viewing, navigating and possibly printing (depending upon security settings) PDF documents.The Adobe Acrobat Reader is the freeware component of the the package. Adobe makes the Reader application available for free download for almost all platforms.
• Acrobat Distiller is a pay component that converts files from postscript to the PDF file format.
• Acrobat Exchange is a portion of Acrobat that was created for annotating, creating hyper-links, and adding security control to PDF files. Basically this is the program that edits new PDF files.

To try out your new version of Adobe Reader, click here to open the IDDL's eLearning Overview.

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