Name and Export a PDF You Built

The last two minutes of building a document decide most of what the recipient experiences. Not the paragraph you rewrote four times: the name on the file, what the document properties say about it, and whether anybody opened the thing before it was sent.

The builder exports on one button. What follows is what that button does, what the name field will actually accept, and the short list of checks worth running before the file leaves your machine.

A PDF arrives in an inbox as one row in a list, and the name is the whole preview. document.pdf is what the builder starts with, so a document exported without touching that field arrives telling the recipient nothing and sorting alongside every other document.pdf already in their downloads folder.

A name that works usually carries three things: who it is from or about, what it is, and when. Dates written in year-month-day order sort themselves correctly without any help, which is worth more than it sounds once there are twelve of them in a folder.

The rules are short, and they are applied at export rather than as you type:

• Nine characters are replaced with a hyphen: backslash, forward slash, colon, asterisk, question mark, double quote, less-than, greater-than, and the vertical bar. That is the set Windows refuses in a path, which is the strictest of the common rules and therefore the safe one to apply everywhere.
• A `.pdf` you type yourself is not doubled. A trailing extension is removed before the real one is added, so notes.pdf exports as notes.pdf rather than notes.pdf.pdf.
• Spaces, capitals and accented letters are kept. Nothing is lowercased and nothing is transliterated.
• An empty name becomes `document.pdf`. So does a name made only of spaces, because the ends are trimmed before it is checked.

One consequence is worth spelling out, because it looks like a fault the first time you meet it. The replacement happens before the trimming, so a name ending in one of those nine characters ends in a hyphen instead. A name typed as Q1 report: final? is saved as Q1 report- final-.pdf. That is a name rather than an error, and the fix is not to put those characters there.

Your operating system and your browser still get the last word. A file whose name collides with one already sitting in the downloads folder is usually saved with a number added to it, and that is your browser's doing rather than the document's.

Everything the preview showed you, and four things it did not:

• Page numbers, if you asked for them. They are stamped once the pages exist, which is why they were never visible in the preview.
• The document title and the author, written into the PDF's own properties. Both are visible to anyone who opens the document information panel in any reader.
• A producer and a creator field, both recorded as Novus PDF.
• Font data for a custom font. A font you embedded travels inside the file as a subset of itself. The three built-in families do not need to: Helvetica, Times and Courier are standard faces every PDF reader already supplies.

What the export does not do is upload anything. The PDF is assembled in the tab you are looking at and handed straight to your browser's downloads, which is also why there is no copy of it anywhere to recover. Close the tab before you download and the draft is simply gone.

1. 1

   Read the warning strip

   Anything the layout could not do cleanly is listed above the preview: margins that left no room for content, or a character the standard fonts cannot set, which is replaced with a question mark. It is a strip rather than a dialog, so it is easy to scroll straight past.

2. 2

   Check the page count

   The preview reports it beside the heading. If a two page letter is showing three pages, something at the foot of page two has spilled over, and finding that out now is cheaper than hearing it from the recipient.

3. 3

   Read the line under the button after exporting

   It names the file that was saved and how many pages went into it. If that is not the name you meant, you have caught it before sending rather than after. A custom font missing a glyph is different again: that stops the export and says exactly which character is missing.

4. 4

   Open the downloaded file, not the preview

   Open it in whatever reader you actually use. The preview positions every line with the real font metrics, but it draws the glyphs in your browser's own fonts, so a narrow column can look slightly wider on screen than it measures in the file.

5. 5

   Print one page if it is going to be printed

   The printer driver decides what happens at the edges of the paper, and drivers differ. One sheet answers the question that no amount of checking on screen can.

• Fill or sign it in the editor. The intake form starting point is built for this: its ruled lines are the shape the automatic field scan looks for.
• Add a password with the protect tool before it goes out by email.
• Number it late with the page numbers tool if it is about to become part of something larger.
• Combine it with the pages you already have using merge.