PDF has a reputation — often well-deserved — for being cumbersome to view and navigate online, but it doesn’t have to be that way on your site. With a little work and the right tools (Nitro PDF Professional, for example), you can make sure that the PDF content on your site is working to make your visitors’ experiences better rather than worse.

In fact, many of the common complaints webmasters and surfers have about PDF are easily fixed — you just have to know how. Below we discuss some of the most common complaints and how you can deal with them.

1. Unclear the link goes to a PDF file (and not a web page)

One pet hate for many people occurs when you click on a hyperlink and all of a sudden discover your PDF viewer is trying to load. When it happens, you may have to wait seconds, you may have to wait mintues, or the PDF may not load at all.

The simplest solution to this is to warm people before they click on the link. If people know what’s coming, they’ll be much more accepting and forgiving if it takes a little more time to load than a lightweight web page.

• Put a text label saying ‘PDF’ as part of the text link or next to it.
• Provide file size information next to the link so people have some idea how long the file might take to open.
• Include information on the number of pages in the PDF file to help the user decide whether it’s better to download the file to their computer or just open it directly in their browser. (I think reading longer PDF files is preferable outside of a web browser).

2. PDF files take too long to open

When created using default creation settings, a PDF must be completely downloaded before it will open — which means a long wait before visitors to your site see anything at all. Not many people realize this, but using the right creation tool allows you to optimize your PDF files to display as they download, so users see content as soon as each page has loaded — a dramatic improvement in user experience. This is known as ‘byte-serving’ or ‘linearization.’

If you already use PDF creation software, check the conversion settings for options such as linearize or fast web view — if they’re there, you’re in luck. If you need to need to make an existing PDF file capable of ‘byte serving,’ then you’ll need to use professional PDF editing tools like Nitro Pro or Adobe Acrobat.

• Linearized/optimized PDF files are essential when people are viewing your PDF files on the web as they load the PDF in your browser one page at a time, instead of downloading the whole file before displaying it.

3. Troublesome to navigate PDF

When a visitor to your site loads a PDF, the result is usually a frustrating interruption of the navigational experience, as the user goes from clicking hyperlinks to scrolling through a seemingly endless series of pages. Adding bookmarks to an existing PDF goes a long way to fix this broken behavior.

A bookmark tree is an excellent navigation aid that provides a convenient navigational, aid as well as a convenient overview of the entire document and its contents. Bookmarks and hyperlinks can even open web pages or other PDF files, turning the bookmark pane into a true cross-site navigational element.

4. PDF files are too large

When you post larger PDF documents for online reading, even optimized files can suffer from some performance issues, as visitors are still forced to download all the pages preceding the content they want to read. A neat way around this problem is to split the PDF into smaller pieces — usually a table of contents and a series of chapters — and then link each piece with bookmarks. Instead of downloading the entire file, users only download individual chapters at a time, resulting in a much smoother user experience.

• Use Nitro Pro’s page splitting tool to automate the task and split up your document based on its bookmarks or groups of pages. Existing bookmarks stay active, letting the user click between each file without realising they are looking at more than one file.

5. Too much scrolling and zooming in PDF files

Viewing PDFs online is often a disruptive experience, with your users needing to scroll from side-to-side or adjust the zoom level inside the PDF window to view your content. By setting the the default viewing settings to values suited to online viewing, however, a lot of this discomfort can be alleviated. Any good PDF editor should allow you to create new PDFs with appropriate settings or apply them to existing files.

• Use the initial view settings to control how a PDF is displayed when it is first opened in a web browser. Set the page zoom/magnification level at ‘Fit width’ and if there are bookmarks in the file, set the navigation to display bookmarks.

6. Leverage the strengths of PDF files

For some website tasks, PDF is a better choice than HTML — consider the strengths of PDF, and see if there are any parts of your site that would work better as PDF than as HTML. PDF is a self-contained format that displays and prints reliably, retaining layout and document security, no matter how many times it is downloaded, copied or forwarded. If you want to produce faithful versions of existing web content for print, PDF is the ideal delivery format.

Teach your users

This won’t help you improve your PDF files, but you might like to think about educating site visitors to alternative PDF-handling solutions. Many people out there hate Adobe Reader and get frustrated when browsers take too much control away. Here’s some other options:

• Our PDF Download add-in for Firefox gives you back control over PDF files on the web.
• Foxit Reader gives you an alternative to Adobe Reader that is really quick to load.
• Use a Flash-based viewer to display PDF files without forcing the user to download them. (See our Free online web services for PDF list for some options.)

One of my all-time favorite PDF tricks enables you to sign your PDF files without having to print them out first.

Cast your mind back and see if the following sounds familiar: You’ve received a form or document (as a PDF) that you must sign, but you can’t write on your computer screen. This leaves you with a number of ridiculous choices, like:

• Print the PDF, sign it, scan it back to PDF, and then email to sender, or
• Print the PDF, sign it, fax it back to the sender, or
• Print the PDF, sign it, and then mail it back to the sender.

The trick I’m going to show you using Nitro Pro will let you sign any PDF you receive with a couple of clicks (assuming the file is not secured). To start with, you’ll need a scanner to get your signature into electronic form, but once that’s done all you’ll need is Nitro Pro to do the signing.

Note: An important thing to know before we begin is that this trick is very different to inserting a real ‘digital signature.’  The digital signatures you can use with PDF files with Nitro PDF Professional and Adobe Acrobat are there to show not just a visual representation of your hand written signature, but to protect the integrity of a document and make it tamper proof. See our secure and sign PDF files feature info for more.

Here’s a screenshot to give you a quick visual idea of what we’re going to achieve. In it you can see me selecting my signature stamp annotation (see our annotate PDF page for related feature info), and also the signature stamp applied to a page in my PDF.

Setting up your signature

The first task is to get a copy of your handwritten signature onto your computer.

1. On a piece of white paper, sign your name.
2. Open Nitro PDF Professional.
3. On the Home tab, in the Convert group, click the arrow below Create PDF .
4. Click Create PDF From Scanner .
5. Choose your settings, and then click Scan.
6. Your signature should now be in PDF form and ready to crop to size.
7. On the Insert and Edit tab, in the Pages group, click Crop.
8. Drag around your signature and crop it so your signature has very little whitespace around it.
9. Double-click on the highlighted area, and then click Crop.
10. Save and name your signature.

Setting up a signature stamp annotation

This task takes the PDF file containing your signature and turns it into a stamp annotation.

1. Open Nitro Pro.
2. On the Review tab, in the Comment group, click the arrow below Stamp.
3. Click Create New Stamp.
4. Browse to and select your newly created PDF with your signature, and then click Save.

Adding your signature to a PDF

Now that you’re set up, it’s just a matter of ’stamping’ your signature onto the page wherever and whenever you like.

1. Open Nitro Pro.
2. On the Review tab, in the Comment group, click the arrow below Stamp.
3. Select your signature stamp.
4. On the page to sign, click and drag the stamp to the correct size. Click on it to drag it to the correct position.
5. That’s it, you’re done. Save the file and email it to the sender.

This trick relates quite closely to another tip I’ll cover soon: how to fill in forms in PDF files by inserting text.

Stay tuned.