Odd question

[beerabuser30]

I am typing up all of a bunch of letters that my grandpa sent during ww2. I am going to get them printed in books for different family members. The site I am going to use for the printing accepts either .doc files or .pdf files. I really want them to look professional and every time I download pdf files they just seem to look better and more professional. What would you guys suggest to use to make it look the best? And do you have any tips?

 

[kimsland]

Certainly many areas on the web use PDF as the norm.
But to create this you will need the full version of Adobe Acrobat, as Adobe reader is just a reader, and therefore useless to what you need.

So in that case you may be down to MS Word. Now MS Word can save your document into different format, ie: DOC; RTF; MHT; HTM and a few others

If you own MS Word, then many users tend to save in web format (ie HTM; MHT) this is so to upload onto their personal websites

Now, you were asked for either DOC or PDF format only
Therefore, if you have the full version of Adobe Acrobat, then certainly PDF would be preferred, otherwise if you have MS Word only, then go for DOC

You may want to re-confirm that the company will not accept HTM, or HTML format

I hope this helps you

 

[SNGX1275]

I don't think it will matter at all, there is no inherent better quality in .pdf files than .doc.

How they look will determine how you format what you write and what font you use. You could download OpenOffice which will allow you to save as .pdf. But all that does it take what it looks like in OpenOffice and makes a pdf from it.

I don't actually know of any difference in how Acrobat Professional will format it, but I don't think it would be any different, only more expensive.

 

[beerabuser30]

I have Word, Open Office and the full version of Acrobat.

 

[kimsland]

:grinthumb Fantastic

What would you guys suggest to use to make it look the best?

Therefore I say Adobe Acrobat

 

[JudaZ]

Use PDF.
The reason for it is that if you print(or watch) a word document on a computer diffrent from the one that created the document,
and that computer have a diffrent printer or miss the fonts you have used to type the letters with, the layout will change.
Text might not fit on the page, some fonts have larger spacing between letters then other and so on.
You could basiclly get 3 diffrent print out from the same document on 3 diffrent computers if you use a non standard font or if you are just unlucky,
and the printer installed changes the document a lot.

With a pdf document, the text will always print and be displayed in the same way, no matter what computer you use,
or what OS it's running: mac, linux, windows and so on. That was the whole reason for pdf in the first place.
(portable document format)

Best is still if you stick to stanard fonts that is common in all systems , otherwise make sure you incorperate the font in to the pdf document
Then it is truly portable an can be read by basiclly all systems, even mobil phones, as long as they have a pdf reader,
And it will always look the same.

 

[SNGX1275]

I don't know how you'd make sure the font is included in the pdf, but you will need to do this.

I thought that once you made a pdf all was well on whatever could read it, but after saving a Word document as .pdf in Office 2008 (Mac) and then transferring it to a PC it would open up and display fine, but it did not print fine, it printed a bunch of characters and blocks because it was missing the fonts I used (even though it would display perfectly).