Adobe is a company which created a way documents can be saved and distributed in a standard way. It called this "Portable Document Format" (or "PDF"). A document saved in PDF will be displayed in the exact same manner regardless of what computer system is used and, when printed, will look exactly like the printed version of the document. It is handy because what you get is exactly what went to the printer, and all necessary fonts and graphics are included in the file. You must have a free program called Adobe Acrobat Reader installed on your computer to view or print a document in PDF format.

Microsoft Word is a standard word processor. Files saved in this format can be opened by Microsoft Word, or a word processor such as WordPerfect which can read Microsoft Word format. The file can then be modified or printed, but it may not look exactly like the printed copy of the booklet.

One reason for this is the fact that there are two standards for paper size in the world: one in the United States (called "letter size" paper) and one in the rest of the world (called "A4" paper). If the document was created using one size and you want to print it on another size both Acrobat and Word can print it for you. Acrobat will adjust the size of the type slightly so what you see looks very close to the original document. Word, on the other hand, will adjust the size of the margins and may move text from one page to another to accomodate all the text. The result, with a Word document, will have all the text but will look differently than the original file.

The second consideration are the characters themselves, which are defined in something called a "font." Whereas PDF files have all the needed fonts included in them and will therefore display fine on any system, with Microsoft Word you must have all the fonts used by the author on your system. There are auxilary programs, which you may or not have installed on your system, such as Adobe Type Manager (ATM), which will help with "font-substitution." These programs can do a fair job with the languages similar to yours, but won't help with languages which have many characters different from yours. If don't have the appropriate fonts, then the document will display and print with missing characters and/or very funny looking characters.

Which format is better to download, then? If you are just going to read or print the booklet, then Adobe PDF format is probably best. This is especially true for languages very different from yours. You will need the Acrobat Reader installed on your system, but these days most computers come with this program installed. If you don't have it, you can obtain a copy by clicking on the link below. If you are going to modify the text or want to include some the text in a document of your own, then the Microsoft Word format is probably best.

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If you need a copy of the Adobe Acrobat Reader, click here: