PDF Formatting

Nov 01, 2018

Most of my students prefer a PDF version to be available for digital note-taking. The formatting in PDFs is pretty terrible, namely the awkward page breaks that occasionally split an image or text or create almost totally blank pages. Any advice on how to build the blocks so that they flow better in a PDF?

Thanks,

- Jacki Hudec with WSU College of Medicine

23 Replies
Alyssa Gomez

Hello, Jacki!

The export to PDF feature in Rise will break the content over pages, and that has caused some oddities that our team has been looking into.

In the meantime, you may be able to correct text size and page break issues by editing the exported course in Adobe Acrobat Pro.

I also linked this discussion to the existing issues our team is looking into, so I'll keep you posted here with any other updates! 

Glennis Harris

Hi Alyssa - any news yet on the 'oddities' when doing PDFs of SCORM - we have big courses that we develop in RISE and then need to provide PDFs to the students as study notes, and I am getting loads of complaints from students because the PDF notes look so unprofessional with all odd breaks in sentences etc. Look forward to your feedback.

 

Cass Netzley

We have a person on our team re-paginate, build a PDF friendly TOC, and align titling/headings-- as well as inserting a custom cover page into our exported RIse PDF's (Using Acrobat Pro DC). Otherwise, it looks like what others above have described as unprofessional.

In the original export format, it's certainly not what we're ready to send off to our PDF printing vendor where students can order up a hard copy to be sent to them. IMHO, the original export is only viable as an internal markup/notes/SME review copy. 

Crystal Horn

Hi there, Allen. The PDF export helps teams meet compliance requirements by having a "hard copy" version of their e-learning content. We are tracking a feature request to improve the formatting of the output for wider use, so I've made sure that your comments are included in that report.

We'll update you here with any changes!

Allison Znachko

Yes, this is a problem area for our team, as well. We have some contractors who need to take the courses outside of our LMS, as well as folks that have accessibility issues. The exported PDF is just a mess. It is too many pages, it's not user friendly, and it takes me an extraordinary amount of time to clean them up in order to share them with our users. Thank you for working on this feature.