This study looks at how law school faculty are using PDF technology, how satisfied they are with it, and what concerns they have about their use of PDF. The report gives detailed data on the extent of use of PDF, the reasons for use, and the use of various programs for developing, editing or manipulating PDFs. In addition, this survey pinpoints the degree of concern over security, ease of editing, format conversion, and other issues frequently encountered by users of PDF technology. The study looks at the perception of difficulty in working with scanned documents, problems with loss of formatting, and use of digital signatures, watermarking, password protection and encryption.
Just a few of 118-page report’s many findings are that:
-
19.15% of full law professors sampled convert documents to or from PDF daily.
-
41.7% of female faculty use digital signatures.
-
Nearly 46% of survey respondents experience problems with loss of formatting when working with PDF documents.
-
4.85% of respondents need to edit a PDF every day.
Data in the report is reported in the aggregate for the entire sample and broke out by many institutional and personal criteria such as law school ranking and size, and personal respondent age, gender and work title, among other variables. More than 100 law school faculty from more than 60 law schools participated in the study.