(As a public service, I am running this appendix verbatim from the book.)
There’s a right way and a wrong way to make a PDF. Based on an unscientific survey of the PDFs I get from other lawyers, just about all of you are doing it the wrong way.
The wrong way: print the document on paper and scan it to PDF.
The right way: “print” the document directly to PDF.
How to print directly to PDF
Windows | Install a printer driver that outputs PDFs instead of sending a file to a physical printer. If you have a commercial version of Adobe Acrobat (not just the free Acrobat Reader), the ‹Adobe PDF› driver should already be installed. If you don’t have Adobe Acrobat, numerous third-party PDF printer drivers are available. When you issue the print command, you’ll see the ‹Print› dialog box. At the top of this box is a popup menu listing the installed printers. Select your PDF printer. Set other options as needed and click ‹OK›.
Mac | You don’t need a special print driver — printing directly to PDF is built into the Mac operating system. Issue the print command. The dialog box that appears has a button at the lower left labeled ‹PDF›. Click this button. From the menu that appears, select ‹Save as PDF›. In the next dialog box, enter a filename and click ‹Save›.
“What’s the difference? Either way, you end up with a PDF.” True. But one PDF is much better than the other.
When you print a document and then scan it to PDF, you’re defeating most of the benefits of using a PDF at all. Essentially, you’re making a series of photos of your document and packaging them inside a PDF. These photos occupy a lot of disk space, they’re slow to view or print, they have to go through OCR to be searchable, and any care you’ve put into typography will be diluted by the reduced quality of the scan.
But printing directly to PDF stores your document in a compact, high-resolution format. Instead of a series of photos, the document pages are stored as a series of scalable mathematical shapes (or vector graphics as they’re sometimes known). These shapes take up very little space on disk, are fast to view or print, are searchable without OCR, and preserve your typography with perfect fidelity. (If you have bitmap images in your document, like JPEGs, they will still be stored in the PDF as bitmaps.)
What about fonts? When you print directly to PDF, fonts are embedded in the PDF as necessary to preserve the text formatting. So readers of the document will always see your intended fonts, even if they don’t have the same fonts installed on their machines.
“But my document has exhibits. How am I supposed to get those into the word-processing document?” You don’t. Print the word-processing document to PDF as described above. Then add the exhibits to the PDF using Acrobat or another PDF-editing tool.
Got it? Good.
PS. A concurrence from the First Circuit Court of Appeals. “PDF files created this way use less file space than documents that have been scanned and are text-searchable.” Also with detailed instructions and screenshots for WordPerfect, Word, and Acrobat.
I agree completely that a PDF printed directly to PDF looks and acts superior to a scanned image. Not to mention that by printing and scanning defeats any attempt to communicate in a “paperless” fashion, since the document must be printed first.
Stupid question, however: how do I get my signature, or an image of my signature, into the document?
Our electronic filing rules in Nebraska allow us to use “/s/ John Doe” on any document electronically filed, in lieu of an actual signature. I don’t mind doing that, but I prefer the look of a “real” signature. And I really don’t like how “/s/ John Doe” looks on a letter.
Suggestions?
By the way, love the book and the website. It’s completely changed how I prepare documents, for the better.
First, a digression (that I couldn’t fit into the book).
While the “/s/ John Doe” electronic-signature idiom is common among lawyers, it’s not a magical format that guarantees your electronic signature is valid. Courts have different rules about what constitutes a valid electronic signature. To be safe — look it up.
For instance, in federal district court in Nebraska, the “correct format for an electronic signature” is “s/ John Doe” (without a leading slash). D. Neb. Local R. 11.1(a)(1)(A). Is “/s/ John Doe” also valid? While it’s hard to imagine a decision turning on the presence or absence of a leading slash, I’d sure hate to be the lawyer who finds out the hard way.
“But that’s how all the other lawyers in the district make their electronic signatures.” The less said about that justification, the better.
Moreover, an explicit electronic signature is often not needed at all. In D. Neb., the ECF login & password used to file a document acts as a signature. D. Neb. Local. R. 11.1(a). I agree that a blank signature line at the end of a document is cosmetically unappealing. But before you tinker with the appearance of your electronic signature, make sure the functional requirements are satisfied.
As to your question — can you put an image of your signature in a document? Yes.
First: make a scan of your signature. For best results, sign a blank sheet of paper, using a moderately thick pen (like a 1mm gel pen) with blue ink. Why a blank sheet? So that your scan doesn’t have extraneous markings that you have to edit out. Why a thick pen? Because the subsequent image processing tends to thin out the line of your signature, so it helps to start thicker. Why blue? I think it looks better, and you can always make blue ink into black (by converting it to a monochrome image) but you can’t go the other way.
Then you have two options. You can add the signature to your documents within your word processor, or you can make it into a stamp in Adobe Acrobat that can be applied to any PDF. There’s no reason you can’t use the same scan in both places — that’s what I do. But it’s a little more work to make an Acrobat stamp. For documents that come out of your word processor, having the signature scan already there means one less step. But the Acrobat stamp is useful for PDFs that you don’t generate (for instance, government forms).
Then…
These instructions are old but still work. If you get flummoxed by image-handling programs like Microsoft Paint or Adobe Photoshop, anyone under age 20 can help you.
Thanks for your comments. I don’t practice much in federal court; in our state courts, the signature rules include the leading slash (see Neb. Ct. R. § 6–409). Most attorneys I know who file documents electronically with the state courts simply print them, sign them, scan them, and upload them. I generally use “/s/ John Doe” and print the PDF directly from the word processing software. I will likely continue to do that for electronic filing, but when I e-mail letters to opposing counsel, for example, I would like to have some image in the letter that looks like a reasonable facsimile of my signature. I will take a look at the instructions. Thanks again for your work.
Another way, which has the added benefits of working with scanned PDF sent to you by opposing counsel and being possible away from your desk, is to open the PDF in a reader app (I’m partial to GoodReader) on your tablet and sign with a stylus.
I am familiar with the option in Mac OS X to print to PDF, and have also used the Print to Adobe PDF option because I have Acrobat Pro installed on my machine. However, I notice a difference between the output of the two, in terms of quality. The difference is particularly noticeable when using the PDF driver built into OS X. In that case, the document looks much better when viewed in Apple’s Preview application than in Adobe’s Reader or Acrobat applications.
When using the built-in PDF driver and viewing in Adobe’s applications, most fonts look uneven. Characters within the same word appear to randomly change point size and weight, when they are all the same in the source document. In Preview, they look fine. As I mentioned, this problem is less pronounced when using the Print to Adobe PDF option, but is still not satisfying in terms of preserving the look of the original document. I realize that at least 90% of my potential audience is going to view a PDF in an Adobe application, so I want to be sure my documents look great for that audience.
I have tried to figure out why this happens, and tried to identify fonts that are less susceptible to the issue, but nothing has been quite right. A number of forums online discuss the problem but do not provide a satisfactory solution.
Are you familiar with this phenomenon? What are your thoughts?