Metadata

See the PDF metadata page.

Accessibility

See the PDF accessibility page.

File sizes

Acrobat documents should not exceed 1.5MB per 100 pages. That equates approximately to 15KB per page. Occasionally documents will be larger than this as the content necessitate it, for example documents containing lots of photographs or tables.

PDF Version

The HSE standard is to save PDF documents so that they can always be read by the latest three versions of the reader. At the time of writing the latest Adobe Acrobat reader is version 8 (June 2007) we therefore save PDFs down to version 6.

Links

Do not put links in PDFs to other documents.

• they are not checked
• they are not maintained or updated as items move
• they sometimes are broken in the conversion process from word to acrobat (especially in longer documents)

However, links within a document to other parts of the same document are encouraged as an aid to navigation.

Branding

PDFs published on the HSE website and Intranet are not exempt from the corporate brand and must adhere to certain basic principles. The minimum of which include:

• HSC/E banner
• Legible sans-serif font such as Helvetica or Arial
• Structured document (e.g. if you build in word, use word styles to format the document)

If all of this is too much for you, simply download one of our Word templates and start typing. Any queries please feel free to ring the webteam.

If your document does not adhere to the HSEC/E brand then unfortunately we may have to reject it.