Getting Started with, and Getting the Most out of, SAS® ODS PDF: No Mastery of PROC TEMPLATE Required

Abstract

Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) provides the ability to deliver documents that display content exactly as you intended, and that are not easily modified by a recipient. Though SAS ODS (Output Delivery System) does support creation of PDF output, there are several important ways to make ODS do it much better. Some of the means to do so are not obvious, if documented at all. After presenting the basics, this paper shows you how to most effectively combine small PROC outputs, or a table plus a graph, on one PDF page. For larger documents, to replace the default PDF Table of Contents (a.k.a. "Bookmarks"), it shows you how to create a HyperLinked Table of Contents, and CrossLinked PDF pages. For PDF documents with only one output component, the ODS-provided Table of Contents is best suppressed. While pop-up text may be familiar for web pages, that it is also possible for PDF pages is less well known. Here you can learn how to do it. Also presented are: (a) how to make pop-up text and hyperlinks data-dependent; (b) how to create hyperlinks to destinations or other files (including audio clips and video clips) outside your PDF document; and (c) how to imbed and size images in your PDF documents. Some new SAS 9 features are briefly discussed. No prior experience with ODS is assumed.