SLV School District Perspectives

Dealing With PDF Files

The school board meeting agendas and minutes are in a form called PDF, which stands for Portable Document File. This is a way to convert documents originally intended for print into electronic form. Unfortunately, many people have trouble with these files. Here are some tips:

1) You need the Adobe Acrobat Reader software to view PDF files. If you don't have it, get a free download from the Adobe site. If you don't have the most recent version (6.0), I recommend that you upgrade.

2) Recognize that things encoded PDF are still best as print material - plan to print them out. They really were never intended to be read online, and are generally a pain to try to read that way.

3) There seems to be something about the way these files are put on the SLVUSD site that caused them to crash my browser when I was running Acrobat Reader 5.0, even though I didn't have problems with PDF files from other sources. If you haven't gotten around to upgrading (or if you're still having trouble even if you have), try this trick: RIGHT-click on the link, and choose "Save Target As..." and download it to your computer. Then, if you use Windows, it will appear in the Documents section of your Start menu. Select it there, and it will open.

4) Remember that you've opened a new piece of software - you aren't in your browser any more. You can still search and copy and print and all the other things you can do in a browser window, but the software is set up differently, so you may have to hunt a bit for these functions.

5) If you want to look for something in the document without printing it, the function that resizes it is often very helpful. There are little 2 little circles on the tool bar - one has a + in it and the other a -. You can use these like Alice in Wonderland's cakes - the (+) makes it bigger and the (-) makes it smaller. Or you can click on the arrow beside the box near there to change it to the size you want - "100%" being the standard 8.5" X 11" size.