How to save a PDF for the web

If you are maintaining a set of web pages for your job, you may be asked to post a PDF. Each company has different standards when it comes to linked files. For instance, how and where to save them, and what the file naming convention is. In this video I’ll speak about where to save your PDFs, and how to set up the initial view in Acrobat.


-NOTE: I’ve set up accurate closed captioning for all my videos. If you don’t have earbuds or speakers, go ahead and click the CC button.

Directory Tree

If the site you’re working with is a static site, then it is possible that you’ll need to save your pdf file to a directory such as ‘assets/pdfs’ or just ‘/pdfs/’. Find out about your company’s site structure and save pdfs together with all the other files of the same filetype.

If you are working in a dynamic site, also called a content management system, or CMS, do a little research to see if you can upload directly to the media library or if you need to locate a certain folder to store your PDFs.

Saving PDFs for the Web

I used Adobe Acrobat CC for this tutorial, and I walk you through the different settings in the properties panel. To optimize your PDF for search engine results pages, be sure to add a title and description in the properties panel. To help with accessibility, be sure to check if a language is declared in the properties panel. The last action to perform is to do a save-as, then either save a new copy or save it over itself. This changes the last checkmark in the properties panel, where it says “save for fast web view.”

I’ll write more about saving for accessibility in another post.