U.S. Department of Energy - Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy

Communication Standards and Guidelines

PDFs

PDFs comprise a large portion of EERE content. To ensure consistency and accessibility for visitors, EERE has developed a robust set of standards for PDFs. Following is an "at a glance" view of PDF requirements as well as more in-depth resources for writers, PDF creators, and Web developers.

PDF Standards At a Glance

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

  • MetaFields

    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 7.

  • 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.

In-Depth Resources for Creating PDFs

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