PDF documents

PDFs are the most common standard for sharing read-only documents of all types. They are also one of the most common document formats uploaded to Wordy. This popular file format was developed by Adobe in 1992 for documents with text and images. A PDF file contains a complete description of its contents, including the layout, text, fonts and any other information needed to display the document correctly, regardless of the application software, hardware or operating system.

PDFs can be produced by many applications, including those in the MS Office suite. In a Wordy context, since PDFs are read-only, an editor will annotate a PDF with comments with suggested changes rather than changing the text itself. Most editors will use Acrobat Reader when working on a PDF, although other tools are available. Customers may also need to use Acrobat Reader to view the annotations made by a Wordy editor.

Making such annotations is slower than changing the text. For example, adding a single comma requires the editor to click “insert text”, type a comma and then clock “post”. For that reason, some editors will avoid working on a PDF because doing so may not be cost-effective compared to other document formats. Moreover, each such annotation has to be subsequently applied by the customer to the original source document.

A traditional publishing workflow might look like this:

DOCX (author) → DOCX (editor) → PDF (typesetter) → annotated PDF (proofreader) → final PDF (printer)

So, PDFs are effectively proofread rather than copy-edited. The ethos of proofreading is to make minimal changes in comparison to the more substantial changes of a copy-edit because of the higher costs of making changes in a typeset document (a small change can affect the pagination, which then affects where headings, figures and tables are placed, the table of contents and so on). PDFs are most appropriate, in a Wordy context, for a final typeset document that needs minimal changes compared to a raw document from an author that needs numerous corrections. PDFs are good for documents with a lot of formatting, such as brochures and presentations. It is usually better to upload text-heavy documents to Wordy in a format such as DOCX.

When I work on a PDF, I first convert the PDF to a text file, open that in MS Word and save as DOCX. I use Word only for the spellchecking and grammar checking. Suggested changes are still applied to the PDF as annotations. If lots of changes are required to a sentence or paragraph, I’ll create a single annotation in the PDF with the new text rather than separately annotating each change. Although such block changes make it more difficult for the customer to see exactly what has changed, the customer should be able to apply the annotation as a single change to the source document.

Text embedded in images

From an editor’s perspective, a PDF contains two sorts of things: text and images. Text is selectable within Acrobat Reader whereas things in images are not. Only selectable text counts towards the word count. As jobs are priced and editors are paid based on the word count, any text embedded in an image will not be checked. If the images in a PDF contain a lot of text, it is likely that an editor will cancel the job and return it to the customer with a request that the document be uploaded again in a more suitable form, which may or may not be possible for a customer.