Best Practices for Authoring Portable Documents

Use named styles, and avoid directly application of text attributes
Avoid OLE embeddings
Avoid 'fancy' fonts and try to use widely-supported fonts such as Arial, Times New Roman or Courier New
Never align content with spaces or tabs. Always use text alignment or indentation
Never refer to content by page or line, e.g, "As shown on page 24". Use live references instead
Embedded media, such as images, should be in widely supported formats such as JPG, GIF or PNG. Avoid platform-specific formats like WMF or BMP.
Don't generate table of contents by hand,let the application handle it for you
Don't go overboard with 3D effects, special animations / effects in presentations
Avoid macros / scripts