Homeschool Connections

PDF Document Help

What is PDF?

"PDF" (Portable Document Format) is Adobe® Acrobat®format. PDF is a proprietary format that allows you to read electronic documents either on- or off-line. This format provides a page-by-page view of documents, exactly as they appear in their printed form. You can read more about PDF at Adobe's PDF introduction page.

How do I open a PDF document?

Adobe provides a free Acrobat Reader that allows you to view, navigate, and print PDF files across all major computing platforms. Be aware that this is a large program -- the installation download is over 20 megabytes in size.

Also available is the Foxit PDF Reader, a much smaller application (about 1.5 megabytes versus Adobe Reader's 20 megabytes or more). While smaller and faster, some people have claimed that its display quality is inferior to that of Adobe's Reader. We have found that it works nicely for most PDF documents. Our documents work well with the Foxit Reader.

Installing one of the PDF document viewers above will allow you to view the PDF documents on this site.

If you are using the Firefox browser, there is a very useful browser add-on called "PDF Download" that allows you to choose whether to download, save, or open immediately, when clicking on PDF document links.

I can view the document, but now what do I do?

There should be an icon near the top of the window for printing the PDF document.