If you’re like me, you want to make the best impression you can on admissions committees at the law schools you are applying to. You might be a little design savvy, or know someone else who is, and may have created a personalized letterhead to match all of your documents – Personal Statement, Addenda and Resume. It’s a noble effort, but surely one which will cause you a headache if you don’t read this first. Here’s why:
I took the time to create a professional-looking letterhead in Adobe Illustrator (CS2). I then used the letterhead for my Resume, Personal Statement and Addenda, all created in InDesign. We all know how difficult it is to manipulate images and text in Microsoft Word, and InDesign gives me control over the tiniest details – ligature, leading and the like. Don’t get me wrong, I still use Word for all my word processing needs, but InDesign gives me the attention to detail necessary for documents intended for professional presentation.
I exported my InDesign creations as PDFs under the assumption that LSDAS would take .doc and .pdf files as attachments to applications. When I began finalizing my applications, I attempted to attach my PDFs unsuccessfully. Realizing LSDAS only accepted standard word processing file extensions (.doc, .rtf, .htm, .docx, etc), I scoured the Internet for a way to convert to the .doc format.
After wasting an hour of time on various unsuccessful ideas I found on Apple and InDesign user forums, I opened my PDFs in Preview, dragged the selection tool over the entire page, copied and pasted into Word (with the margins set to 0″ on all sides to maintain the integrity of my InDesign perfection). The result was a page-sized PDF “image” pasted over a Microsoft Word document page. I was proud.
That is, until I uploaded the documents (seemingly successfully). Thinking I was completely done with this nonsense, I previewed an application package before submittal. Instead of nice PDFs pasted in Word converted back to PDF by LSDAS, there was only a small message in the center of each document page: Quicktime and a decompressor are required to view this image. After twenty minutes of painful explanation to LSDAS support, I was told to try saving my PDFs as JPG, paste and upload again. No dice, same message.
I sent my documents to my LSDAS support technician, who resent them as Word Documents after doing his own conversion and testing them on an LSDAS test account. He converted the PDFs in Adobe Reader 8 (Adobe Acrobat Professional does this too, if you have Adobe’s Creative Suite Package). Unfortunately, my would-be knight in shining armor lacks the attention to detail that I obsess over, and I forgot to tell him I had already tried converting the PDF through its native software suite. My letterhead was intact for the most part, but was scrambled and uneven. The advanced changes I made in InDesign caused Word to combine and split paragraphs, add lines between paragraphs, and generally make all my InDesign efforts futile.
So, before you waste hours creating documents that would pass the muster of God and Steve Jobs, keep in mind you’ll waste countless more hours trying to convert them so they can be reconverted by LSDAS. In the end, you may just end up printing and mailing your application package, as I probably will.
There is a silver lining to this dark and stormy cloud: Apple’s Preview is an amazing application with the capability to transcend the boundaries of file extensions more seamlessly than ever. No more conversion software or the convoluted mess you get with Adobe Acrobat exports, that is, unless you’re using the LSDAS.
Alternatives to Acrobat
Here are a couple of so-so solutions that do better than Acrobat, so long as the PDF isn’t too complex:
Zamzar.com – Allows you to upload a PDF and convert it to a variety of formats. They’ll send you an email with a link to your converted document, which can be a little inefficient
File Juicer is a program that can extract elements of a PDF (Images, text, etc). It converts best to .rtf, and would work great for a PDF you want to add your own notes to. Does not work well for trying to maintain the visual integrity of a PDF with InDesign-created logos and the like.
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