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PDFs

PDFs make up a large portion of EERE's Web content. This section includes EERE's requirements for creating and linking to PDFs, as well as the best practices for creating, finalizing, and optimizing PDFs.

Requirements

The following elements are required on all PDFs.

Thumbnails or Bookmarks

To enhance usability, embedded thumbnails or bookmarks are required on PDFs that are two or more pages. Bookmarks are strongly recommended for documents that are more than 16 pages.

Open View

PDFs should be set to open as follows:

  1. Magnification – Fit Width
  2. Page Layout – single page
  3. For PDFs that are two or more pages, thumbnails or bookmarks navigation panes should be open

Meta Fields

To optimize PDFs for search engines, title and subject meta fields should be filled out with an accurate description of the document. Subject text should be at least 71 characters long.

Accessibility

PDFs should be made as accessible as possible either through native document tagging or the "Make Accessible" plug-in in Adobe Acrobat.

Compatibility

Create PDFs to be compatible with Adobe Reader 8 or lower.

Directory

All PDFs must be stored in a /pdfs/ sub-directory.

Linking to PDFs

Links to PDFs on EERE must convey to the visitor that the item being clicked on is a PDF and also must include the PDF size in kilobytes or megabytes, e.g. (PDF 36 KB). Per Section 508, there must also be a link to Download Adobe Reader.

See all of EERE's requirements and best practices for Linking to PDFs.

Meta Fields

To optimize PDFs for search engines, title and subject meta fields should be filled out with an accurate description of the document. Subject text should contain a minimum of 71 characters and a maximum of 200 characters, including spaces.

Open View

PDFs should be set to open as follows:

  1. Magnification – Fit Width
  2. Page Layout – single page
  3. For PDFs that are two or more pages, thumbnails or bookmarks navigation panes should be open

Scanned PDFs

Scanned PDFs, where the entire content of the PDF is an image, cannot be read by screen readers. If you post a scanned PDF, you must include a text version.

Thumbnails and Bookmarks

To enhance usability, embedded thumbnails are required on PDFs that are two or more pages.

Bookmarks are strongly recommended for documents that are more than 16 pages.

Best Practices

See the following pages for more detailed instructions on these topics.