by Laura Acklen
www.wpwriter.com

Since 1999, Corel® WordPerfect® Office has provided the most robust PDF publishing capabilities of any office suite available. Requiring no purchase of additional plug-ins or downloads, the Publish to PDF feature ensures that you can share your WordPerfect documents, Quattro Pro spreadsheets and Presentations™ slide shows with virtually any computer user. When you consider that Adobe® Reader® (the free PDF viewer) is installed on more than half a billion computers worldwide, it's easy to see that PDF has become the standard file format for exchanging information.

Over the years, Corel has continued to improve the Publish to PDF feature. The latest version, Corel WordPerfect Office X3, incorporates each of the following improvements that were made along the way:

WordPerfect Office 2002 - The Publish to PDF feature in WordPerfect 10 was significantly enhanced, so that files could be published to PDF with graphics (including watermarks) and hyperlinks intact.

WordPerfect Office 11 - Support for symbols was added to the Publish to PDF feature in WordPerfect 11, which reduced the file sizes of graphics-laden documents when they were published to PDF. Furthermore, the page numbering functionality was improved, so that page numbering would be consistent between the WordPerfect file and the PDF file.

WordPerfect Office 12 - Enhancements were made to the Publish to PDF feature to decrease file size and to update compatibility with Adobe® Acrobat® 6.0. For example, the default setting was changed from High to the standard dots-per-inch (dpi) setting of Acrobat 6.0, which eliminated bloat in PDF files. The setting could be switched back manually if the user wanted to preserve details. Also, the dpi thresholds for image resampling (1-bit, grayscale, and color ) were changed to match Acrobat 6.0 settings.

New PDF features in Corel® WordPerfect® Office X3
In Corel WordPerfect Office X3, the Publish to PDF feature has been enhanced to translate table of contents headings into PDF bookmarks. This means that when you publish to PDF, each of the headings in your WordPerfect document's table of contents becomes a bookmark in the PDF file. You can quickly navigate through a lengthy PDF document simply by clicking these bookmarks.

With Presentations X3, the Publish to PDF feature has been enhanced to translate slide names into PDF bookmarks. Just as you can navigate a document by clicking the bookmarks created from table of contents headings, you can easily move back and forth between slides by clicking the slide-name bookmarks.

Catching up to the rest of the crowd, Quattro Pro® X3 now includes the same robust PDF publishing capabilities offered by WordPerfect and Presentations. Anyone who has the free Adobe Reader software can view the Quattro Pro X3 files that you publish to PDF. In addition, you can choose to export only a portion of a spreadsheet by specifying a page range when you publish to PDF.

WordPerfect X3 also introduces a powerful counterpart to the Publish to PDF feature: the PDF Import feature. By simply opening a PDF file, you can now import the text and graphics directly into WordPerfect and save them to any of the 150 file formats that WordPerfect supports - WPD, DOC, PDF, XML, or HTML, to name just a few. You can now capture and reuse content from PDF files without having to purchase a third-party PDF editing application. For more information on this exciting new feature, see the March 2006 tutorial, "Importing PDF Files in WordPerfect X3."

Working with the Publish to PDF dialog box in WordPerfect® X3
The Publish to PDF feature works essentially the same way in all three applications, so most of the information presented in this section for WordPerfect applies to Presentations and Quattro Pro as well.

To publish an open WordPerfect document in PDF format, choose File > Publish To > PDF to display the Publish to PDF dialog box. This dialog box has four tabs, each of which is discussed below. If necessary, click the General tab to display the options shown in Figure 1.

The General page of the Publish to PDF dialog box allows
you to name the PDF file and choose a compatibility setting.

Check the suggested filename in the File Name text box, and if you need to, make the necessary adjustments. By default, WordPerfect publishes the entire document to PDF. If you want to publish only a section of the document, make your selections in the Export range area. You may need to open the Compatibility drop-down list so that you can choose the version of Adobe Reader installed on the intended recipient's computer.

You can specify various options when you create a PDF file. For projects that require many changes to the default Publish to PDF settings, you can create a custom PDF style. From then on, you can simply select the style from the PDF style drop-down list - all of the controls are set for you.

Three style presets are available: Smallest File, which is suitable for online viewing; Standard desktop printing and viewing, which is suitable for viewing and printing on a desktop computer and printer; and Highest Quality, which is suitable for sending to a high-quality printer or digital copier. To create a style, click the plus (+) button. To delete a style from the PDF style drop-down list, select it, and then click the minus (–) button.

At this point, you can click OK to create the PDF file, or you can continue to specify settings on other pages of the dialog box. When you click the Objects tab, the controls shown in Figure 2 appear.

The Objects page of the Publish to PDF dialog box lets you specify
settings for font handling and bitmap compression.

You can embed fonts to ensure that they look the same when the PDF is opened on a different computer. Embedded fonts increase the file size, but they also increase portability, because the fonts do not have to reside on the recipient's computer. If you are using unusual text characters in your document, you may want to enable the Export all text as curves check box to ensure that the characters will be accurately displayed. This method increases the file size, however.

If your PDF file contains bitmap images, you can decrease the file size by compressing the bitmaps. The compression option is available for JPEG, LZW, and ZIP files. If you choose JPEG compression, you can also adjust the quality factor from a high setting of 2 to a low setting of 255. The line art and text are also compressed when the Compress text and line art check box is enabled.

When you click the Document tab, the options shown in Figure 3 appear. Hyperlinks allow you to jump to a Web page (or other Internet URL), and bookmarks allow you to link to specific sections of the PDF file. If you want them to appear in the PDF file, you can enable one or both of the check boxes in the Bookmarks section. Remember that if your document has table of contents headings, they will appear as bookmarks in the finished PDF file. If you want to have the bookmarks appear when the PDF file is opened, you can choose the Bookmarks option.

The Document page of the Publish to PDF dialog box
allows you to include hyperlinks and bookmarks.

When you click the Advanced tab, the options shown in Figure 4 appear. On this page, you can set the color model to apply to the file. You can use grayscale, which means that the color is replaced by varying shades of gray, or either the RGB or CMYK color models. The CMYK setting maximizes the color processing, so it is most often used during a prepress cycle. The RGB setting falls in the middle of the range and is suitable for posting the PDF file on the Web. Of the three models, grayscale produces the smallest PDF file.

The Advanced page of the Publish to PDF dialog box lets you choose
a color model and optimize the PDF file for the Web.

If you are preparing PDF files to post online, you can enable the Optimize for Web check box. PDF documents are loaded one page at a time, which speeds up processing. You can also embed a file in a PDF file. You might, for example, embed the WordPerfect document that you used to generate the PDF file.

Working with the Publish to PDF dialog box in Presentations™ X3
The Publish to PDF dialog box in Presentations differs from the dialog box in WordPerfect in that the General page contains additional options for publishing the slides, speaker notes, audience notes, and handouts (see Figure 5).

The General page of the Publish to PDF dialog box in Presentations
provides extra options in the Export range area.

Working with the Publish to PDF dialog box in Quattro Pro® X3
Once again, the Publish to PDF dialog box in Quattro Pro resembles the dialog box in WordPerfect except for the General page. The Export range area contains options for printing the notebook, the current sheet, a particular range of cells, or a range of pages (see Figure 6).

The General page of the Publish to PDF dialog box in Quattro Pro
provides extra options for publishing different parts of a notebook.

Installing Adobe® Reader®
If you do not already have Adobe Reader on your system, you can easily install it from the Corel WordPerfect Office CD #2. Insert the CD in the drive, and wait for the installation wizard. If it doesn't start automatically, choose Start > Run, browse to the CD drive, and then double-click setup.exe. When the wizard appears, choose Adobe Reader setup, and follow the instructions.

When you have installed Adobe Reader, you should be able to double-click a PDF file in Windows® Explorer (or My Computer) so that it opens in Adobe Reader for you to view. Adobe Reader also integrates with your Web browser, so that when you select a PDF file in the browser, Adobe Reader starts automatically and displays the file.