SUMMARY: How to print picture-perfect digital copies of estimates, invoices, and other Clients & Profits X reports.

Without an application like Adobe Acrobat, it wouldn't be possible to save and read accurately-rendered electronic copies of Clients & Profits estimates, invoices, orders, statements, and management reports. Adobe Acrobat lets you print any report from Clients & Profits X (or any program) to disk as a fully-formatted digital document. These documents (called "pdf" files, which stands for "portable document format") can be stored on a user's hard drive, the shop's file server, or a client's web server -- without losing any of the report's formatting.

Acrobat PDF files can be attached to e-mails and sent to clients or vendors, who can read and print them using the Adobe Acrobat Reader application. Acrobat Reader is a free program that's included with Microsoft Windows and the Mac OS as well as with Netscape and Internet Explorer. (It is also available free for downloading from the Adobe web site.) The PDF documents created from Clients & Profits X are cross-platform, so they can be read and printed by anyone using Acrobat Reader regardless of the computer they're using. Since Acrobat documents include embedded fonts, your clients won't have problems printing them to look exactly as you print them at the office.

This tech note describes the steps needed to create Acrobat files from Clients & Profits X. It also contains a link to a step-by-step tutorial that illustrates the process. THE CLIENTS & PROFITS HELPDESK DOES NOT PROVIDE TECHNICAL SUPPORT FOR ADOBE ACROBAT. Installing Adobe Acrobat can be technical, so you should have access to an computer expert who is familiar with printers, fonts, and operating systems.

Why not just export reports? Although Clients & Profits provides an option to export any report to disk (i.e., to your hard disk or file server), this option is only useful for transferring data to spreadsheets or databases. When a report is printed to disk, a tab-delineated text file is created, containing the report's content. This text file is formatted in a row-and-column layout to make it easy to open and customize in Excel. If this text file is opened in a word processor, it'll have no lines, fonts, graphics, margins, tabs, or other formatting. This makes it unsuitable for attaching to e-mail.

Printing quality with Acrobat and Clients & Profits

Acrobat PDF files print reliably and accurately on any PostScript laser printer, and reasonably well on non-PostScript ink-jet printers. But the variety of printing devices that include Adobe PostScript 3 technology (the most recent version of the standard page-description language) take full advantage of PDF files to produce the most reliably precise, highest-quality output. Adobe's PDF files have the same imaging capabilities as Adobe PostScript software because PDF is based on the PostScript language. This assures you the highest level of compatibility when you print PDF files on Adobe PostScript printers.

What about fonts?

When you create a PDF file, the PDF driver in C&P X automatically embeds fonts within the document. Embedding fonts guarantees that the reader of the PDF will be able to view the original, even if they don't have the fonts installed on their system.

What about graphics?

If you are printing a document with an embedded graphic, C&P X automatically sets compression of graphics to a minimum. The more compression set by the PDF driver, the lower the quality of the printed image. The file size will be larger, but in the high bandwidth environment we have today, sending a larger file electronically isn't a problem.

How to create Acrobat PDF files from Clients & Profits reports

Creating PDF files from Clients & Profits is nearly as easy as printing on paper. The hardest thing about creating PDF files is choosing a name, since each estimate, invoice, or report you save will have its own unique file name (such as, JOB101EST.PDF). You can choose any kind of name for your Acrobat files, but they all must end with .PDF.

1 Choose File > Print Destination > PDF.

2 Follow the steps to print the report you wish to create your PDF from (i.e: estimate, invoice, etc.).

3 Click Print

4 A dialog will appear, asking you to name and save the PDF file to your hard drive. After you have finished, click save.