NSF Grant Proposal PDF Requirement

The National Science Foundation FastLane system requires that project descriptions in grant proposals be submitted in Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) version 1.2. This is the default output format of the Adobe Acrobat 3.0x Distiller. Adobe Acrobat 4.0 Distiller must be set to use Adobe Acrobat 3.0's format, among other requirements enumerated on the NSF's FastLane PDF Creation Hints and Pointers page, including downloading and using an NSF-prepared Acrobat 4.0 profile.

The MSU P-A Computing Staff has made certain resources available to assist faculty and researchers in their NSF grant proposal process on MS Windows and Unix platforms.

MS Windows

We have installed Adobe Acrobat 4.0 on one of the departmental Windows NT computers in room 125. Contact the P-A Computing Helpdesk to arrange access to it.

If you prefer, you may purchase a copy of Adobe Acrobat 4.0 for your own PC or Mac from the MSU Computer Store. The price as of 01 October 1999 was $83.00.
For assistance in setting it up and using it, contact the P-A Computing Helpdesk.

Unix (Solaris)

We have installed two programs on kepler.pa.msu.edu which will generate PDF version 1.2 files from standard PostScript files.

Adobe Acrobat 3.0 Distiller
There are two ways of running this program.

• /usr/local/bin/distill   <filename.ps   >filename.pdf
  There is a long list of options for the command-line interface to the program, covering a wide range of non-default optional behaviors.   To set your default options to those required by the NSF FastLane program, copy this file to your login directory on kepler.pa.msu.edu and name it AcrobatDistiller.
   
• Copy your filename.ps PostScript file to /var/tmp/Acrobat-Distiller/IN/filename.ps and wait five to ten minutes. Then look in /var/tmp/Acrobat-Distiller/OUT and your file will be there along with filename.pdf.
  This auto-conversion method assumes you have no non-default optional settings in mind (but the defaults have been set up to match the NSF requirements).
   

Ghostscript ps2pdf

• /usr/local/bin/ps2pdf    filename.ps    filename.pdf
  There are options available for ps2pdf, as well, as mentioned in its man page and in its documentation.

The default output of both of these programs is PDF version 1.2, and both can be set to be compatible with earlier PDF versions (but not later ones). Note that in their command line options, ps2pdf refers to versions by PDF version number, while Adobe Acrobat Distiller refers to versions by Adobe Acrobat version number, according to the correspondence in this table:

Adobe PDF version	1.1	1.2	1.3
Adobe Acrobat version	2.1	3.0	4.0

For advice & assistance in using these software tools, contact the P-A Helpdesk.

For best results in most cases, print drivers should be set to create PostScript files which conform to the Adobe Document Structuring Conventions. In most versions of the MS Windows PostScript printer drivers, this means selecting the option "Optimize for Portability" (which is not the default). The more common programs which produce PostScript code directly, both on MS Windows and Unix systems (e.g., dvips), tend to conform to these conventions by default (though there are exceptions).