Writer Guide
40 PDFs
PDF (Portable Data Format) developed by Adobe is an open, operating system independent
format. It is very popular for distributing documents. PDF documents have two big advant-
ages:
• they are protected against further manipulation (some cannot even be printed or
saved or require a password to be opened)
• the formatting is printer independent
Use the red-white PDF button in the menu bar to export your document directly to PDF.
Use freeware PDF24 to manage PDF documents, for instance to delete individual pages or
merge PDF files together. Members of the Linux-Ubuntu community can download the pro-
gramme Master PDF editor gratis to freely manipulate PDF files.
41 Saving your files
Here you really can’t be careful enough. Please heed the following prescriptions:
• limit yourself to alphanumeric characters and underscores; avoid capital letters, diacrit-
ics, spaces and dashes; for two reasons: i) having everything in minuscules increases
legibility; ii) technically different countries and different operating systems can have
problems opening and sorting files with non-basic characters and capitalization
*
• save your work regularly, about every five minutes, using ascending numbering and
easy to remember mnemomics:
thesis_title_professorsname_ownname_01
thesis_title_professorsname_ownname_02
thesis_title_professorsname_ownname_03
• mail your work to yourself regularly, so you have access to it from anywhere you might
be; don’t rely on memory sticks
42 Several files open at once
We already had the opportunity to work with two windows at the same time, one for our text
and the other for statistical calculations in the spreadsheet. Nothing prevents you from having
as many windows open simultaneously as need be, e.g. one for your literature database.
This work method is often used in group work to copy and paste the different parts into a
new document. However, this is not the proper way to go about it. See section 10 on Group
Work.
* Linux for example, unlike Windows, treats “Thesis.doc”, “THESIS.DOC” and “thesis.doc” as three separate
files and also sorts all capitals before minuscules.
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