So if you have some obscure desktop-publishing program that you love but no one else has, convert your document to a PDF before sharing it. Anyone you send the PDF to can view it using Adobe’s Acrobat Reader software — a free download from Adobe’s Web site: www.Adobe.com. If you want to create your own PDF documents, however, you’ll need a different program to create them — more on that later.

How can PDFs help a Church?

PDFs are helpful for sharing documents with church members and staff. The church newsletter, special forms, sign-up sheets, flyers, posters, annual reports, maps — just about anything — can be converted and distributed to anyone, anywhere. For example, place a newsletter on the church Web site or e-mail an event flyer as a PDF. If the recipients have Acrobat Reader, they’ll see your document just as you intended.

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Recipients can even print the PDF; and that saves the church some printing costs. If you need to have something professionally printed, deliver a PDF — by e-mail or on disc— to your print shop. Placing an ad in the newspaper? Save some drive time and e-mail a PDF to the news-paper. (Note: Professional printing may require special settings. To ensure that your PDF is prepared properly, ask the print shop or newspaper if it has guidelines or specs for creating PDFs — embedding fonts, linking files, etc. Your program’s Help menu can answer related questions.) The more you use PDFs, the more uses you’ll find.

What do you need to create PDFs?

The original do-it-all program is Adobe Acrobat . The standard edition costs around $265.

Unfortunately a non-profit discount isn’t available. If you don’t have the budget for that purchase, or would just like to see what a PDF can do for you, check out http://createpdf.adobe.com. You can create your first five PDFs online for free. After that the online version is $9.99 per month. An alternative to Acrobat is PDF995, a PDF generator that can be downloaded free from www.PDF995.com. It may not do as much as the full Acrobat pro-gram, but it’s fully functional and free. It’s essentially “ad-ware”that shows you an advertisement each time you run it, but that may be a reasonable trade-off. If you don’t want the ads, spend $9.95 and it’s yours forever, with no advertisements.

This is a program that anyone can afford.