[Flex] grants.gov and pdf

[Helen Gordon]

Dear FLEX-ers:
I am having fun being persistent with the grants.gov helpdesk. They 
actually have escalated my questions to someone who is technically literate.

As you may be aware, grants.gov started transitioning to pdf application 
packages and away from xfd packages last year. We hadn't been impacted, 
so I left well enough alone. Now we are beginning to see PDF application 
packages. Lynn Stellrecht had one to USGS yesterday and the omni for 
USGS is another. So I guess USGS has made the 'switch.' I thought it 
would be easier for us as PDF is cross platform and we all have licenses 
for Acrobat.
But this is grants.gov - what was I thinking!?!

The helpdesk is very confusing about pdf packages. I think they may have 
tagged my profile as 'troublesome person' by now...
What I do know so far:

Acrobat 8.1.1 is needed on any machine that is going to open or work in 
the pdf package. They claim that opening the package or working in the 
package with a different version will mess up the package and you will 
have to start over. They designed their pdf's to work with 7.0.9 and 
then adobe went to higher versions. 8.0.x did not work correctly. 8.1.1 
(latest release/update) does work correctly.

Make sure you have the fastlane job options available on your machine 
for fastlane submissions...

'save and submit' refers to GCS submitting the package to grants.gov.
'save' is for all of us working in the package.

If you see a plus sign ('+') in a field, it means you have entered more 
text than they will print - your program manager will see truncated data 
when it is submitted.

your advocate, from the trenches,
Helen