Write a Clean Document in the PDF Builder

Most of what makes a document readable is settled before anyone reads a word of it: how many sizes of text there are, how far apart the paragraphs sit, and whether a heading means anything. The document builder hands you a small, fixed set of those decisions.

This is a guide to the two blocks you will use more than all the others put together: Heading and Paragraph. The sizes you get, the spacing you do not choose, and what happens to the words when you press export.

There is no cursor roaming around a page and no free canvas. You add blocks from a row of buttons, move them with up and down arrows, and the layout runs them down the page in the order you left them. A Heading block holds one heading. A Paragraph block holds as much text as you type into it, and wraps and paginates on its own.

Both carry the same styling controls: a font (Helvetica, Times or Courier), a size in points, a colour, an alignment, bold and italic. A heading is not a different kind of object from a paragraph. It is a text block that starts with different defaults.

• Heading 1 sets at 24 pt, bold.
• Heading 2 sets at 18 pt, bold.
• Heading 3 sets at 15 pt, bold.
• Paragraph text sets at 14 pt, regular.

The level selector prints those point sizes next to each option, so you are never guessing at the difference between a two and a three. They are starting points rather than locks: type a number into the size field and it uses yours instead. The level still decides the weight and the gap it leaves behind it, so a Heading 3 dropped to 14 pt is not the same object as a bold paragraph.

Here is the part worth being exact about, because it is easy to assume the opposite. The builder writes a heading as larger, bolder text. It does not write a tagged structure tree, which is the separate layer a PDF can carry to tell software that a particular run of text is a level-two heading. A heading in an exported document is therefore a visual signal to a person reading the page. It is not a machine-readable outline, and this is not a PDF/UA or tagged-PDF accessibility claim.

That makes the test for a heading simpler than usual. A heading earns its place when a reader skimming the page needs to find that section again, or needs to know they can skip it. It does not earn its place merely by sitting at the top of something. A three-line note does not need one, and a bolded first sentence carries the same weight at a quarter of the vertical cost.

Keep the mapping rigid. If Heading 2 means a section and Heading 3 means a step inside it, keep that true for the whole document. Nothing enforces it and nothing will warn you, which is exactly why it drifts by page four.

Every block leaves a gap below itself, and you do not set it. A paragraph leaves 10 points. A Heading 1 leaves 14, a Heading 2 leaves 12, a Heading 3 leaves 10. There is no space-after field on a block card, because there is no space-after control at all.

Read those numbers together and something falls out that is worth knowing before it annoys you. Nothing adds space above a heading. The gap above one is whatever the block before it left behind, which for a paragraph is 10 points, while the gap below is 12 or 14. A heading therefore sits slightly closer to the paragraph it follows than to the one it introduces, which is the reverse of what a heading is for.

The fix is the Spacing block. Put one directly above a heading and give it a height in points, 72 points being an inch. Between 12 and 24 is usually enough to make a section start look deliberate. It is the only vertical spacing control in the builder, and this is the main reason it exists.

You can press Return inside a paragraph block and the line break survives to the PDF. A blank line stays a blank line. That makes a single block a reasonable home for an address, or a signature block where the shape of each line matters more than the flow.

Runs of spaces do not survive. When a line is laid out it is split on whitespace and rejoined with single spaces before it is ever measured, so three spaces become one in the preview and in the export alike. Choosing Courier does not rescue it, because the spaces are gone before the font is consulted. If you need columns, that is what a Table block is for.

Every paragraph is embedded as selectable, searchable, copyable text in the font it was set in. Ctrl+F finds it in any reader. Opening the export in the editor later treats it as text rather than as an image, and text extraction returns it in the order the blocks were drawn.

The built-in families cover Western European text. A character outside that range is replaced with a question mark and the preview warns you rather than letting it reach the export unnoticed. That is what the local font embedding is for, and export then checks that the variant you selected really contains every glyph you used.

1. 1

   Read the preview, not the editor

   The preview runs the same layout the export runs, measured with the same embedded fonts. The line breaks and the page count in front of you are the ones you are going to get.

2. 2

   Check the rhythm at a glance

   Scroll the preview out until the text is too small to read. If the shape of the page does not tell you where the sections begin, the headings are not doing their job.

3. 3

   Download before you close the tab

   The draft lives in this tab only. Nothing is uploaded, so nothing is backed up either, and closing the tab loses it.