The specific characteristics of the World Wide Web mean that publishing documents using this medium has a number of unique requirements and presents a different challenge to anyone wishing to put documents on the Web. Key issues which have to be resolved include determining the nature of the documents to be published, identifying whether documents should be published directly or from an intermediate form, and deciding what sort of document creation tool should be used. Three types of documents can be published on the Web: formatted documents--documents which cannot be edited or have their contents searched, such as images; processable documents--the contents of which can be searched and/or edited, such as text documents; and formatted processable documents--documents that are content searchable and allow hypertext linking, but do not allow editing and require that documents exist as a collection of pages, such as documents produced in Adobe Acrobat. The paper defines HTML (hypertext mark-up language) and Adobe Acrobat, explains how HTML and Acrobat documents are created, and describes key characteristics of the two and to what Web applications each are suited. It also addresses converting documents that exist only in paper form to Web readable pages. Two case studies illustrate the conversion of paper based documents directly to Acrobat, and the use of SGML (standard generalized mark-up language) as a basis for output. (Author/SWC)