To Print or Not to Print? Either Way, PDFs Can Help You Cut Business Costs.

Are you wondering the same question about printing? You’re not alone. Despite the drive to move to paperless environments in recent years, many people continue to print documents into hard copy form — be it out of necessity for their type of industry, to meet legal requirements, because it’s a longer document or text that’s easier to read on paper – or simply because it’s just an old habit that’s hard to break!

Portable document files (PDFs) are one of the most used file formats for sharing documents electronically. Why? They were developed, by Adobe, to be compatible with different devices and systems in various places. PDF files can be optimized and compressed into smaller files without reducing quality, which saves space, and speeds up transmission times — and that includes sending huge documents to the printer queue!

Whether you’re working towards a completely digitized environment, or just looking to save money on your printing costs, there are advantages to using PDFs.

What you’ll learn

PDFs can help reduce overheads and printing costs.

There are a few ways that using PDFs can help you reduce both your overheads and printing costs. And there are no prizes if you’ve guessed the first one, it is kind of obvious!

  1. Electronic use only has no printing costs.
    Storing all your documents in PDF files only can mean zero printing costs. That’s right, zero. No paper, no ink, no toner, no cartridges. If you are not under any legal obligation to keep paper copies of your documents, you can pull up your PDF files on any device, anywhere, at any time without any need for printing.
  2. Digital filing systems save money.
    Digitally storing your documents in PDF format also saves you money on filing systems, storage boxes, physical space, and labour to put them there. You can choose to go with electronic storage systems on-premises up in the cloud with services like Adobe Document Cloud.
  3. Reducing file sizes saves time and money.
    Optimizing your PDF file settings reduces the file sizes by compressing all types of content in your documents, including graphics and fonts, and will clean up anything unnecessary. This makes a PDF quicker and easier to send and upload to other people and other devices or systems - including your printer. Using the PDF Optimizer in Acrobat Pro, you can tweak the settings and package up your documents to create versions to suit your needs. For example, low-resolution for electronic-only versions that will only be seen on screens, or high-resolution for any documents where top-quality printed output is a must.
  4. A preferred format for printing companies.
    PDF files are usually the most preferred format by printing companies. If you’re sending any documents or artwork created in-house to a commercial printer, chances are they’ll ask for it in PDF format. If you send your customers or clients compressed PDF invoices or documents by direct email that they might then want to take to a print or copy shop, it’ll be easy for them to do so with a PDF.
  5. Secure format to send and store.
    Sending hard-copy invoices and documents to customers and clients by mail is pretty much a thing of the past. Emailing your documents or invoices to your customers and clients will save on your printing and postage costs. Our free PDF reader software is commonly used on all kinds of phones and devices, making it easy for your customers or clients to access documents if they don’t subscribe to a full version.

When to use PDFs? The choice is yours.

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to when and what PDFs are used for, including when to use PDFs for printing. You name it, you’ll pretty much find it in a PDF.

What you choose to put into PDF will depend on the nature of your business or how you use PDFs as an individual, your content, and who your ultimate end-user of the document is. You can create PDF forms that have form fields for people to fill in their data and return to you, read-only documents, searchable documents, scannable documents, and so on.

Just a few examples of what PDFs may be used for are:

How to create PDFs for printing.

To create PDFs for printing, there are a few things you can do to make sure your documents look their best, and you get the most out of your printer.

  1. Create PDFs directly from many other applications, including Word and Excel by selecting “Print to PDF” from within the program’s print settings. Then select the appropriate size and other settings.
  2. Convert online by simply dragging and dropping. It’s easy to convert your files to and from different formats — for example, jpg to pdf, Word to pdf, PowerPoint to PDF.
  3. Make use of our free trial. If you haven’t already got an Acrobat product, there are many features in Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat Pro, and Acrobat Creative Cloud. Try them out and see which Acrobat pack could work for you.

PDF conversion tips and benefits.

We’ve put together a few other tips and benefits of using PDFs for printing and storing your documents to help you get the most value.

Make PDF printing pay off.

The advantages of printing to and from PDFs are many. PDF. If you’re fully digital, the use of compressed PDFs can help with costs associated with both physical and electronic storage space. If you need printed documents, PDF settings can be set to the output quality you want. PDFs are accepted, accessible, organizable, and secure – for both your business and clients and customers.

Frequently asked question.

Why use PDFs for printing?

PDFs are an efficient and secure way to share and store just about any type of document for printing – from presentations to financial records, policies and procedures, contracts, invoices – the list is long. PDFs can be read and accessed from free software, making it easy to send documents to others without you having to print them first. For physical copies, print quality settings can be adjusted within PDFs to range from ink-saving settings to high-quality outputs.

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