Most of you are familiar with word processors and the files they use. How are these files different from Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files?
    Word processors give you complete editorial freedom. You can change the text in any way you like, and, with some significant limitations, also change its appearance in any way you like. You can't, in general, do this with Adobe Acrobat (at least not with the free Reader). However, the Adobe Acrobat format does a much better job of preserving the original appearance of the document, and will do so over nearly any platform. The word processing files found on this site were all created in WordPerfect, so you will (hopefully) be able to match the document I created - if you have WordPerfect for Windows; if you have the same font I used to create the documents, and if (less important) you have the same printer. Otherwise, you may have to spend some or a lot of time reformatting the document (for example, if you have MS Word instead of WordPerfect). And if you don't have one of the major word processors (meaning WordPerfect, MS Word, or Lotus WordPro), you may not be able to reformat it satisfactorily at all. None of this is a problem with PDF files: the file will look exactly as it was created, on nearly any computer. So, in short, pdf files preserve perfectly the "look and feel" of the document on any platform, but they generally don't allow the document to be modified.

A Brief Description of what You Can and Can't Do with Adobe Acrobat Files:

With the Adobe Acrobat Reader:

• You can zoom in and out to just about any magnification, with essentially no loss of quality.
• You can navigate to different parts of the document using bookmarks and links (which must be predefined).
• You can print all or part of the document.
• You can copy selected text and graphics into another application. [Note that if you do this in order to edit the text, you're better off downloading one of the Word Processor files.] [Note also that you lose all formatting when you do this.]
• You can search for a word or phrase in a given document.
• Fonts are embeded in the document, so you get an exact representation of the original file; pdf files can be thought of as a graphical picture of the original document, with some additional capabilities.
  

Additionally, with the full Adobe Acrobat:

• You can insert, delete, replace, or rearrange pages. [Note, however, that two pages in the BCP is equivalent to one page in the pdf files.]
• You can crop a page (for example, to delete unwanted areas of text).
• You can generate bookmarks, links, and notes.
• You can do minor text editing. For example, you can easily replace the "N." in the Baptism or Marriage services with a person's name, as long as it doesn't carry over into the next line. All editing is done on a line-by-line basis; lines of text cannot be inserted, and blocks of text cannot be deleted. Note that in order to do this, you must have the same font installed on your computer as was used to create the original PDF document.
• You can also do a number of other tasks pertinent to such things as multimedia and forms, which are not of interest here.
• The full Adobe Acrobat package, which also allows you to generate .pdf files in different ways, costs about $300 US; there are very significant academic discounts.