JPEG to PDF for Dummies

One of the adages our shop pretty much lives by is the old saying, "There's more than one way to skin a cat." We like the idea that we almost always have alternatives; opportunities that the folks at Leaf Group, however, don't seem to value. Take, for instance, six-time DotD Kurt Schanaman, who wrote the article "How to Make a JPEG Into a PDF File" for eHow.com (it's since been moved to Techwalla). As far as Kurt and Techwalla / eHow are concerned, there's just one way; and he described it in loving detail.

Yep, Kurt required 371 words to tell his readers how to paste a JPEG into a word-processing document, save it as a .DOC file, and open it in Adobe Acrobat. All fine (if a bit wordy), except that you can't do that! What you can do is one of several things:

Open your jpeg with almost any graphics software package and use the Save As a PDF function With Adobe's printer driver, which allows printing to a file, installed; open the image with just about any software and print to a PDF instead of your printer Use a freeware PDF converter to create your PDF. Use one of the many free online PDF converters Schanaman expounded on his solution for hundreds of words, but the point at which he screwed up is quite clear: "Open the saved document with Adobe Acrobat if it was saved as a Microsoft Word (.doc extension) file. Once the document appears in the main window of Adobe Acrobat, click the large button which says 'Convert to Adobe PDF.'"

Ummm, no, Kurt, that function's not in Acrobat. It's also not in Adobe Reader, which replaced Acrobat a few years ago. There is a "Create PDF" task buried in a weird place in Acrobat Reader, under View > Tools, but you have to pay for that function. More to the point, even when Schanaman wrote this post there was already a "Save as PDF" functionality in Word and OpenOffice Writer. Come to think of it. He may have figured out that last, although he seemed to think that the file had to be saved in the native OpenOffice format first. Idiot.

Instructions written by someone who didn't bother to test them? Edited by someone who also didn't bother to check them for accuracy? Sounds pretty much like Schanaman isn't the only person around eHow who deserved a Dumbass of the Day award...

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