• Adobe Systems Incorporated is the creator of the postscript page description language which is widely used to do high quality printing.
   
• Adobe's "Acrobat" line of products is designed for publishing documents on the Web. The core of that publishing system is the Portable Document Format (PDF) developed by Adobe. The Immunization Action Coalition uses the Adobe page layout software, PageMaker and InDesign, to produce its newsletters and other documents. These documents are then converted into PDF files and placed on our website.
   
• In order to read a PDF file, you need to run, on your computer, the Adobe Reader program which is available for free from Adobe. There are Adobe Reader versions for Microsoft Windows, Macintosh, and Unix platforms.
   
• The current versions of Adobe Reader install a "plug-in" into your browser. With the plug-in, the browser will automatically run Adobe Reader for the display and printing of .pdf files you download from the Web.

Downloading tips

• Instead of immediately displaying the downloaded PDF file in Adobe Reader, you may wish to save the file to disk. You can do this by holding down the SHIFT KEY when clicking on the PDF link.
   
• Many of the PDF files on this site are quite large (more than 100,000 bytes) and may therefore take several minutes to download, depending on the speed of your connection and on how busy the server computer is.

Printing tips

• Large PDF documents require sufficient memory in your printer in order to print correctly. For example, if your laser printer has only 1 MB of total memory, reversed-text blocks may print as solid black with no message given by the printer if the printer is set for high quality printing. This problem may be satisfactorily solved by setting the printer resolution to a lower value, for example, "medium" or 150 dots-per-inch.
   
• If you have insufficient printer memory, another solution is, after downloading the entire file, to print a few pages at a time.
   
• If the PDF document does not print properly from Adobe Reader, you may need to select the "Shrink to Fit" box (located in the lower left corner of the print dialog box)  in order to have Reader adjust the printout to fit each page on a single sheet of paper.
   
• Trouble with the HP Laserjet printed output may be solved by using the following settings (or similarly named ones):
   
  • "Use raster Graphics"  (instead of "Use vector graphics").   This may fix the problem of "reversed" text (white on black background) not printing, as well as other problems.
     
  • "Download TrueType Fonts as bitmap soft fonts" (select "bitmap" instead of "outline" or "graphics").  This may remove the overlapping of text on the printed document.
     
  • "Graphics dithering" select "coarse" or "fine" (instead of "none").  This selection may improve the quality of images contained in the document.