Agent 99 - Online story telling

What is in this article:

1. A general introduction to what a PDF is and why they are important for script writers
2. Can you make a PDF already but you don’t know it?
3. How to download, install and use a free PDF maker

It should take you about 20 minutes of following this tutorial to get your first PDF for print - from then on it’s only a matter of seconds.

So, let’s get going….

1 What is PDF anyway?

A Portable Document Format (PDF) is a postscript file - post script is best thought of as a file that tells a printer what to do. It was popularised by Adobe and most people look at PDF files through the free Adobe reader. The file format of post script is open - a recognised and published standard - and is used to drive a printers. Anything from a basic black and white office laser to a fully fledged four-colour commercial printer can be ‘driven’ by a PDF file.

Post script is NOT a file in that way that a word file is - you don’t directly open and edit it like you would a script. You publish to it when you are ready to send or print your work. So it’s best to think of it like this:

• Script Working file (save and edit, save and edit, save and edit, polish, check, save)
• PDF file (I’ve finished and I want to send it to someone)

So why is this a good thing?

The great thing about PDF is that it is pretty much universal. Because it is only a presentation format and not a working format the printed document will be EXACTLY the same on all computers and printers as long as they have a PDF reader. So this means you can make a file in Final Draft on the lastest Mac and someone on a dodgy old PC will still be able to view and print that file just as you made it.

This is great for scripts because writers often DO have dodgy old computers and a lot of production companies are quite a-hem anal about formatting. So if you make a PDF of a script the production company will see it exactly as you wrote it, regardless of whether you are using wordperfect or word or open office or final draft.

Many competitions will accept submissions in PDF formats, as will most agents, production companies and so on.

2 But don’t I have Abobe already?

You almost certainly have Adobe Acrobat Reader as it is free download and pretty much universal. Acrobat is just the name for Adobe’s PDF reading software.

Note that you CANNOT ‘write’ a PDF file using this free reader. Instead Adobe would love to sell you an expensive program called ‘Acrobat Distiller’ which is used to make high-end print-quality files. It’s a great piece of kit but for scripts it is complete overkill - you just don’t need the power it offers.

You almost certainly don’t have Acrobat Distiller on your computer unless you have a whole bunch of other expensive programs from Adobe like Photoshop or Illustrator.

But don’t I have Abobe already? Part two

However some lucky people already have PDF writing software on their machines:

• All recent Macs have the ability to write to PDF from any application (lucky them). Check your file menu for something that looks like ‘Save as PDF’ or ‘Export as PDF’
• Users of OpenOffice (Mac or PC) have the option to save to PDF as well. If you don’t know what OpenOffice is and need a Word quality office suite then this is the best thing for you: Free, wonderful, check it out here: http://www.openoffice.org/
• Final Draft (Mac or PC) has this option as well, just select ‘export as PDF’

The majority of us - PC owners too skint to shell out for Final Draft - do not have a PDF writer, but don’t give up, I am going to show you how to do it for nada AND for free …

3 Free PDF software

Because the Postscript format is open it can be used by anyone to make a reader or writer - it’s just fiendlishy complicated. There are quite a few PDF programs around but I am only going to show you one because it is legal, free and all you need: PDF Creator.

So first of all download PDF Creator here (this is a software repository called sourceforge). Accept the download (about 12 megs, don’t try this with a modem). For the software-aware this is an opensource project, so all very squeakly clean and legal.

Save the program to disk and run the installer. Your downloaded file should be called something like this: PDFCreator-093_GPLGhostscript.exe. The ‘ghostscript’ in the name of the file is a reference to a open source program that has been around for years and years and does the translationg into Postscript, again highly legal and very free.

There is only one thing to pay close attention to: There is a screen where you can select/deselect the internet explorer toolbat that lets you save webpages as PDFs. I don’t need yet another IE toolbar, so here I have unselected it:

Ok, all installed? Go to your program menu and what do you see? An entry called ‘PDF creator’. But if you open it up there doesn’t seem to be anything obvious to do. In fact you don’t use the program from here, these are just settings and such like, mostly for ignoring.

So how does it work then?

PDFCreator is a ‘printer driver’

PDF writers in general are ‘printer drivers’. Remember that Postscript is a printing format? Well all PDFs are created by doing this thing called ‘printing to file’. So instead of sending your document to a live printer you send it to a virtual or pretend printer and this saves the PDF for you, ready to go, onto your hard drive. Weird huh?

So how do you use it then?

Go to your word processor of choice and open a file. Select ‘print’ to get your normal print dialgoe box. In the top printer menu you should see a new ‘printer’ called PDFCreator:

Make sure you select it then click on ‘OK’.

Normally the document would now go to your printer, but PDFCreator gives you the chance to add some other things to the document before you proceed:

Change these as you see fit. If you want to know why the time and date look wrong it’s because the program shows you the UNIX timestamp - if you look closer you will see it’s in the format YEARMONTHDAYHOURMINUTESECOND all run together like that. Not too pretty, but this is free right!

When you are ready to go click on ‘Save’ and the ‘file save’ dialogue will come up asking you what you want your file called and where to put it. Then when you finally ‘print’ the file you will see your word processor ‘printing’ the pages in the status bar.

When the file is ready it will automagically open in Acrobat Reader. You can now send the PDF via email to the company, competition or whatever of choice by attaching the PDF file using your email program.

Viola. Free PDF.

Some advanced things like making your file safe from ‘copy and paste’

Mostly you can ignore the rest of the program if you are just emailing scripts to people you trust, but if you are a little paranoid about copyright you can stop people printing and/or copy and pasting your work. Barring printing is probably a little restrictive but heres how you can stop people from copy and pasting your work:

1. Print the document and from the PDF creator screen hit the ‘options’ button.

2. In the following dialogue box select ‘PDF’ from the left menu and ‘security’ from the right menu:

   

3. Select the following, just like in the screen grab:

• Select the ‘use security’ option
• Encryption level: High
• Password required: Password required to change permissions and passwords
• Disallow user to: Copy text and images; Modify the document; Modify comments

4. Save these settings and you will go back to the PDF print screen. Now ‘Print’ as above.

1. Finally you will be asked for a password - this is encrypted into the document. Now only people who know that password can alter or copy and paste from your PDF…

More advanced stuff and help

Visit the PDFCreator webpage There are some more FAQ and so on there.

And if you spot any errors in this tutorial please add a comment below…