To Print or Not to Print? Either Way, PDFs Can Help You Cut Business Costs.

Are you wondering the same question about printing? You’re not alone. Despite the drive to move to paperless environments in recent years, many people continue to print documents into hard copy form — be it out of necessity for their type of industry, to meet legal requirements, because it’s a longer document or text that’s easier to read on paper – or simply because it’s just an old habit that’s hard to break!

Black and white photo showing four blank pieces of paper folded into different shapes, such as a flyer, brochure, or sheet folded for mailing.

Portable document files (PDFs) are one of the most used file formats for sharing documents electronically. Why? They were developed, by Adobe, to be compatible with different devices and systems in various places. PDF files can be optimized and compressed into smaller files without reducing quality, which saves space, and speeds up transmission times — and that includes sending huge documents to the printer queue!

Whether you’re working towards a completely digitized environment, or just looking to save money on your printing costs, there are advantages to using PDFs.

What you’ll learn

How PDFs can help reduce overheads and printing costs.
When to use PDFs for printing.
How to create PDFS for printing.
Tips and benefits of PDF conversion tips.

PDFs can help reduce overheads and printing costs.

There are a few ways that using PDFs can help you reduce both your overheads and printing costs. And there are no prizes if you’ve guessed the first one, it is kind of obvious!

Person sitting at a laptop with hands on the keyboard. Overlaying text and graphic shows upward arrows indicating increased quality, speed and efficiency, and downward arrow indicating decreased costs.

Electronic use only has no printing costs.
Storing all your documents in PDF files only can mean zero printing costs. That’s right, zero. No paper, no ink, no toner, no cartridges. If you are not under any legal obligation to keep paper copies of your documents, you can pull up your PDF files on any device, anywhere, at any time without any need for printing.
Digital filing systems save money.
Digitally storing your documents in PDF format also saves you money on filing systems, storage boxes, physical space, and labour to put them there. You can choose to go with electronic storage systems on-premises up in the cloud with services like Adobe Document Cloud.
Reducing file sizes saves time and money.
Optimizing your PDF file settings reduces the file sizes by compressing all types of content in your documents, including graphics and fonts, and will clean up anything unnecessary. This makes a PDF quicker and easier to send and upload to other people and other devices or systems - including your printer. Using the PDF Optimizer in Acrobat Pro, you can tweak the settings and package up your documents to create versions to suit your needs. For example, low-resolution for electronic-only versions that will only be seen on screens, or high-resolution for any documents where top-quality printed output is a must.
A preferred format for printing companies.
PDF files are usually the most preferred format by printing companies. If you’re sending any documents or artwork created in-house to a commercial printer, chances are they’ll ask for it in PDF format. If you send your customers or clients compressed PDF invoices or documents by direct email that they might then want to take to a print or copy shop, it’ll be easy for them to do so with a PDF.
Secure format to send and store.
Sending hard-copy invoices and documents to customers and clients by mail is pretty much a thing of the past. Emailing your documents or invoices to your customers and clients will save on your printing and postage costs. Our free PDF reader software is commonly used on all kinds of phones and devices, making it easy for your customers or clients to access documents if they don’t subscribe to a full version.

When to use PDFs? The choice is yours.

There’s no one-size-fits-all when it comes to when and what PDFs are used for, including when to use PDFs for printing. You name it, you’ll pretty much find it in a PDF.

Set of 23 icons showing different types of documents - technical, informational, book format, diagrams, charts, and adjustable user settings. What you choose to put into PDF will depend on the nature of your business or how you use PDFs as an individual, your content, and who your ultimate end-user of the document is. You can create PDF forms that have form fields for people to fill in their data and return to you, read-only documents, searchable documents, scannable documents, and so on.

Just a few examples of what PDFs may be used for are:

Contracts
Invoices
Vouchers
E-books
Fact sheets
Customer or client information
Travel Itineraries
Policies
Procedures
Recipes
University assignments
Newsletters

How to create PDFs for printing.

To create PDFs for printing, there are a few things you can do to make sure your documents look their best, and you get the most out of your printer.

Create PDFs directly from many other applications, including Word and Excel by selecting “Print to PDF” from within the program’s print settings. Then select the appropriate size and other settings.
Convert online by simply dragging and dropping. It’s easy to convert your files to and from different formats — for example, jpg to pdf, Word to pdf, PowerPoint to PDF.
Make use of our free trial. If you haven’t already got an Acrobat product, there are many features in Adobe Acrobat, Acrobat Pro, and Acrobat Creative Cloud. Try them out and see which Acrobat pack could work for you.

PDF conversion tips and benefits.

We’ve put together a few other tips and benefits of using PDFs for printing and storing your documents to help you get the most value.

Illustration showing a computer screen with PDF conversation process. The icons around the outside of the screen depict people, a calendar, paper files, an award cup, and a rocket ship taking off.

Use reputable PDF conversion tools. Digital security is an issue worldwide, so choose applications designed with integrity that you can trust.
Make your PDFs user-friendly for your clients or customers. PDF capabilities are many, and include features such as keyword and phrase searches, commenting, highlighting, annotating, bookmarking, and the ability to read the content out loud.
Use security features and settings in your PDFs to protect your content, especially any sensitive personal identifying information or commercially sensitive data. For example, password protection can be used to prevent unauthorized changes, and you can request digital signatures to confirm receipt and/or agreement to content.
Share the PDFs with information you want your customers, clients, or users to have and keep – whether via email, on your website, or on social media channels. They can then access, save and keep copies of your PDFs in electronic or printed form if they choose to.

Make PDF printing pay off.

The advantages of printing to and from PDFs are many. PDF. If you’re fully digital, the use of compressed PDFs can help with costs associated with both physical and electronic storage space. If you need printed documents, PDF settings can be set to the output quality you want. PDFs are accepted, accessible, organizable, and secure – for both your business and clients and customers.

Frequently asked question.

Why use PDFs for printing?

PDFs are an efficient and secure way to share and store just about any type of document for printing – from presentations to financial records, policies and procedures, contracts, invoices – the list is long. PDFs can be read and accessed from free software, making it easy to send documents to others without you having to print them first. For physical copies, print quality settings can be adjusted within PDFs to range from ink-saving settings to high-quality outputs.

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