The recent release of the Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) beta has got me excited, not for the reasons you might expect. Yes, the HTML 5 support is decidedly funky (check out http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/performance/psychedelicbrowsing/Default.html) but what I like is the new printing architecture. (I’m boring like that.) To quote the IE9 blurb:

“To do high quality printing of HTML5, you need a high quality print subsystem. Internet Explorer 9 directly converts web content into XPS format when sending output to the printing system. XPS is a more modern print system with native support for features such as opacity and complex paths, which results in increased fidelity and quality when printing modern web content.” 

What is often overlooked is that XPS is not just an electronic document format like PDF. As part of the XPSDRV (the printing architecture of Windows Vista and Windows 7) it is also a spool format and a page description language. When an application uses the XPS Print Path rather than GDI, the new print path maintains the XPS format from application publication to the final processing in the print driver. This streamlined printing process is quicker and does not suffer from the degradation in quality that can be a feature of older print paths. Windows 7 also expands the range of applications that can take advantage of XPS printing.

So why do I care about this? The answer is that XPS plays an important role in our free PDF creation product. We switched from PostScript-based generation to one based on XPS in the last release. For most applications printing to our virtual driver, the switch is largely irrelevant, but some, including Microsoft Office 2007 / 2010, definitely benefit. The real advantage comes when an application uses XPS from the start to do its printing. A good example is Microsoft Publisher 2010 which uses XPS printing to guarantee print quality and colour fidelity, crucial factors in publishing.  With IE9 we are seeing a mainstream application taking this advantage, as in time more applications will do.

Back to work then looking at IE9, and I’ve just discovered this:  http://ie.microsoft.com/testdrive/Performance/Helicopter/Default.xhtml. Simple but addictive!

For some reason David Stevenson’s last blog post brought a comparison between email attachments and blood types to mind. A person with type O blood is often called a universal donor, because (almost) everyone can be safely given their blood in a transfusion. In the same way, a person with type AB blood is called a universal recipient, because they can safely be given blood from (almost) anyone else.

David effectively described a PDF file as the universal donor for email attachments, like type O blood. You can be pretty sure that the recipient will be able to read it and see the same page layout, images, fonts, text etc as you did before you sent it. So if you want the recipient to be able to access documents as easily as possible, and to read through them in the way that you planned, a PDF is the best way to go.

But just like all best practice, you just know that not everyone will follow it. Your own organization’s internal guidelines often won’t help when you’re receiving files from outside your firewall.

You therefore have to consider not only how you will send email attachments, but also how you might want to handle those that you’re sent by other people. In a sense you need to be a universal recipient as well as a universal donor. This is where the blood type analogy breaks down, because it’s not possible to be both for blood transfusions, but you can do both for email. All you need to do is make sure that you have the tools to read all of the formats that people are likely to send documents to you in … and then ideally to convert them to PDF to let you forward them to your colleagues and follow best practice for delivery!

Recently I received a proposal from a company who had some technology I was interested in. The proposal was accompanied by some supporting materials – some PowerPoint slides and a spreadsheet of costings. To their credit they had pulled all this stuff together into a single PDF attachment, exactly the type of task our product, gDoc Fusion, is so good at. But I found when I opened the attachment that they had missed a trick or two. Firstly, there was nothing to guide me to the pertinent sections. I got started anyway, but when reading it, I found I needed to go back and forth between various sections; it wasn’t a linear read. That’s OK, PDF is good at that sort of thing. But it would have been so much easier if there had been some bookmarks. Bookmarks are a hierarchical list of hypertext links – an active table of contents. They are easy to create and maintain, yet they are infrequently used. They make navigating, therefore understanding, a document much easier. If your document is intended to persuade the reader of a particular course of action, any aid to quicker comprehension must be welcome.
This is not a “how to”, rather a plea to “do so”. Consequently I won’t dwell on how to add bookmarks – you can find that in the help file – but I will share a few tips. Tip number one: If you can get your authoring software to make bookmarks, then let it! It is obviously easier to maintain the bookmarks in the authoring application than having to update them when the content changes. I like to use Microsoft Word, and to get bookmarks all I have to do is use Heading styles consistently. This is also the way that Word uses to generate a table of contents, so you get both. If your Word document has been styled with the Normal style throughout, this mechanism isn’t going to work.
Tip number two: Create the bookmark and destination on one go. When adding a rage number of bookmarks, I first navigate to the view I want the reader to have of the document, swipe some text that corresponds to the bookmark, then type Ctrl-B. In gDoc (and other PDF software) this creates a bookmark, labelled with the text that was selected, that will link to the current view. Continue through the document, scrolling or otherwise navigating to the right view and creating further bookmarks.
Bookmarks are not the only ‘value add’ that can make the life of the recipient of your document easier; hypertext links within the body of the document can help too, and again Word provides an easy method of creating these – just add cross-reference links. You will need to make the PDF using the gDoc Add-in to Word, which is available as part of gDoc Creator from our website, free of charge.
Finally, it’s important to let your reader know that bookmarks are available. In gDoc Fusion, type Ctrl-D and choose Navigation: Open to Bookmarks on the Open Settings panel. Alternatively, use File> Finish Document Wizard. This procedure steps you through this and other settings to ensure your document is presented in a PDF viewer in the right way.