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Topic: Send PDF clips with cover letter?
| Author | Message |
| macyd | Posted – 1/31/2006 9:21:51 PM | show profile Is it kosher to send a PDF clip or two with a cover letter? Or would it only clog up someone's inbox? |
| lenagrove | Posted – 1/31/2006 10:02:28 PM | show profile I usually tell them where I've been published and offer to send pdfs at their request. I do this because I get irritated when people send me huge attachments I don't want. |
| Cyrus | Posted – 1/31/2006 11:31:21 PM | show profile The best option would be to get those large clips hosted somewhere, either in your workspace on Mediabistro if you have a Freelance Marketplace, or a Web site of your own. That would allow you to just point to URLs in cover letters or other correspondence. People could visit them as they desired. Sending large attachments irks a lot of people because many use Exchange servers that give you limited inbox quantities. Cyrus ------ Cyrus Afzali Astoria Communications www.astoriacomm.com |
| willwriteforfood | Posted – 2/1/2006 6:49:35 AM | show profile I'm with Cyrus. Editors are also often wary of attachments because of virus problems and many will never open them, or might even delete your email out-right. If you want to show case a particular article, you can do a direct link to that piece and give a one-line description in your email that makes the editor want to read it. ------ "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." --Douglas Adams |
| chucho | Posted – 2/1/2006 8:12:48 AM | show profile PDFs are cumbersome to open, too. They can even cause browsers to lock up. Many editors will reject your application based simply on the fact you've sent them PDF attachments. Think of it as the ''email etiquette'' version of a grammatical error on your cover letter. I personally think you should smail mail clips. Mailing AND emailing is a good way to get ''two hits'' for the price of one. Post your clips online and send links. Typing your clips in and presenting them like typical news stories you see on online-versions of newspapers might be time consuming, but a good way to present them -- plus a good way to sneak in corrections to annoying copyediting errors in the originals :) On the web page, provide the option to open the clips in PDF format. |
| chucho | Posted – 2/1/2006 8:14:38 AM | show profile Heh ''smail''... nice typo ... good way to abbreviate ''snail mail''. Smail versus email. Note to self... |
| even_newer-id | Posted – 2/1/2006 12:49:31 PM | show profile PDF files don't have to be heavy. If you use low-res settings your PDFs aren't going to clog up anything. There is, however, the attachment problem so I would simply say that you have low-res PDfs and can send them along if the ed. wants to see them. |
| chucho | Posted – 2/1/2006 1:14:10 PM | show profile It's not so much the resolution, though that is indeed another issue -- balancing resolution with file size, especially with full-color, multi-page, crispy clean clips. The problem is more about the booting up of Acrobat Reader to read the PDF. If you're an editor that has 100 emails to go through and half of them have PDF attachments of various sizes and PDF versions, and you're doing other stuff throughout the day, you can end up shutting down and booting up the Reader application numerous times. Considering that many editors usually have slower machines (the designers always get the fancier, newer stuff while editors generally just need email and word processing machines), your PDF could cause an editor's machine to freeze up. Plus, the editor may still be using Reader 5.0 and your PDF is version 6.0. The editor might also have had bad experiences with PDFs. Acrobat Reader's first version of 6.0 had this tendency to lock up browsers, even, shudder, Firefox!, when users clicked on PDF links on the Web (A later update patch fixed the problem, but that doesn't mean some editors haven't sworn off PDFs due to some bad experience.) You never know and it's better to defer to the safest route when applying for a job. If you poke around online, you'll find plenty of other people who advise against ever sending unsolicited PDF clips or offering them as the only option for viewing clips online. |
| born2right | Posted – 2/1/2006 5:39:53 PM | show profile what if you have Web based clips? If the consensus is against sending PDFs then those with paper clips are forced into some sort of scanning process to either send as a word document or post on a their own Web site: neither ever comes out perfect (at least not in my experience). It?s easy enough to send a resume by word doc. but what if the clip you?re sending was posted on a Web site? Copy and pasting that clip into a word doc doesn?t look as professional as a PDF. Can anyone walk me through this resolution issue on PDFs? I like PDFs (I think it looks a heck of a lot better), but obviously will change my ways if editors won?t open PDFs. |
| Cyrus | Posted – 2/1/2006 7:17:48 PM | show profile You don't have to actually scan clips to get them into PDFs. All major scanner manufacturers include software that allows you to go straight from file to PDF, without the need to print so you can scan into a PDF. All this software allows you to regulate the resolution and other characteristics, such as whether or not you want full color, so you can tinker with the various settings in an effort to get the files you want to transmit to a proper or more desired size. ------ Cyrus Afzali Astoria Communications www.astoriacomm.com |
| even_newer-id | Posted – 2/1/2006 9:56:11 PM | show profile What can I say? PDF and Acrobat used to be a pain in the butt for all but the super techie, but they aren't any more. If, you're wary of PDFs, it's time to upgrade. That being said, I still wouldn''t open attachments from someone I didn't know. I got a very nasty worm once and the lesson was learned. |
| chucho | Posted – 2/2/2006 7:06:12 AM | show profile The answer involves having a website and either showing your articles in HTML format, or linking to them, then offering the PDF as an option. And don;t underestimate ''smail''. I've had the best success by applying by email AND snail mail. Sending a manila envelope after applying by email gives you ''two hits'' and shows some additional initiative. Jakob Nielson, the ''guru of usability'' (- http://www.useit.com/jakob/ -) has some great advice about web useability at his site. I think this is useful info, below, from late 2005 (since Acrobat 6.0 has been out). Sure, there's plenty of people who don't feel this way. But when applying for a job, you should alwasy go to the ''lowest common denominator'': ***** Users Hate PDF In several recent usability studies, users complained woefully whenever they encountered PDF files. Following are quotes from investors testing the investor relations area on corporate websites: ''It's a pain that I have to download each PDF. Pain in the ass? I find it to be annoying. It's slow to load. It's hard to search within it. I find HTML easier to deal with? This is all PDF instead of a chart. My dream site is to come to a site and get a bar chart for the sales within the last ten years.'' ''I hate Adobe Acrobat. If I bring up PDF, I can't take a section and copy it and move it to Word. There could be stuff like graphics I don't want. I prefer documents in HTML format so that it's editable.'' The following user quotes are from journalists testing the PR area on corporate websites: ''They [PDF files] don't behave like Web pages. It's not the speed. It is like having a solid thing rather than a fluid thing.'' ''What we've got is a page of a PDF document which is great when printed out, but on the screen it is hard to read. The print is too small?'' ''I am a little frustrated with Acrobat? They made every page a file. So what happens here is when you scroll, it jumps, which is really not helpful.'' This quote is from an employee who was testing an intranet: ''It would have helped if the first page was an index and you could scroll to it. That must be what this side part means. But who am I to say?'' As the last quote shows, even when a PDF file has its own navigation aides, they don't typically help because they're nonstandard and based on a paper metaphor rather than hypertext navigation. We've had similar reactions from users in many other studies, including tests of B2B websites where users complained when sites presented product specs or customer success stories in PDF instead of Web pages. Here's a quote from a customer who shunned those parts of the site that were in PDF: ''It looks like I'm going to have to go to PDF, which I'm dreading.'' ------ Chucho is working in the Middle East as an editor. |
| willwriteforfood | Posted – 2/2/2006 7:44:41 AM | show profile If you do want to convert a document to PDF (and you're not on a Mac which has it built in to most programs in the ''print'' option), I recommend PrimoPDF.com. It's a free program you download that installs as a printer. So you go to print from whatever program you are in and select PrimoPDF and it will convert it to a PDF. You choose print quality or screen quality which takes care of the resolution issues. I really do think having clips posted on a website is the way to go, but if you want to have PDFs as well, Primo works well. I've been using it for about 2 years now. For your web clips, if you want it to view exactly as it does on the site, you can take a screenshot. If you use a program like HyperSnap DX you can select the area you want to capture (which can be much longer than the viewable window) and it always comes out in high-resolution. I used this program for screenshots for my last book and it works really well. It has a free 10 day trial, but it's only $30 for the full license and I use it all the time. You can also edit the image to take out extra white space, etc. which I do a lot. I hope this helps! ------ "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." --Douglas Adams |
| even_newer-id | Posted – 2/2/2006 7:49:23 AM | show profile I hate PDFs too when I'm surfing the web. I want to scroll not open a new file. It's like having to register for a site. Often, I'll just go away But it''s the perfect application for looking at layouts, editing, sending clips. and for that I use it all the time If a wrtier sends a PDF clip I can print it up with no hassles and that's not true of a regular web clip. Anyway, I'm not saying use PDFs for everything, but sending a low res PDF to an editor who's requested it is a perfect use of this particular technology. |
| blazingcontent | Posted – 2/3/2006 12:46:48 PM | show profile | email poster Multiple pages I am on a Mac and save files as PDF's... I hate to sound stupid. But how do you save multiple pages as a single PDF file? For example if I scan a 8-page story I photographed and wrote? How do I save them as one file all together? I don't have Acrobat. Just a Mac w/ Photoshop etc. |
| willwriteforfood | Posted – 2/3/2006 9:21:16 PM | show profile I've not tried it in Photoshop, but in all MS programs you just go to Print and there is an option for ''save as PDF.'' Otherwise, I would use primopdf which does the whole document. ------ "Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job." --Douglas Adams |
| Marie | Posted – 2/3/2006 10:35:25 PM | show profile I would never send PDFs, because they're so cumbersome, unless someone specifically asks for clips and thinks PDFs are wonderful. Frankly, when I query, I present my idea and mention where I've been published towrard the end, with the offer to send clips. I get assignments without even sending clips. One editor actually telephoned another editor I write for and asked about me. Some editors believe that's much more valuable than reading your clips, because they're more interested in what your raw copy looks like and whether you meet deadlines and are nice and easy to work with, which another editor can tell them. For my most recent freelance work, I did send links to relevant clips along with my query, but it's clear my editor, based on our conversations, never read them. So, to sum up, I would submit a well-written query, with the offer to send clips at the end. If you have a great idea that you present well, you'll get the assignment. I don't send clips unless i hear a ''I need to see some clips.'' |
