Adobe's "Portfolio" file format allows multiple PDF documents to be combined into one "portfolio" file (kind of like a Zip archive). This is convenient for sharing collections of documents in a single file, and is commonly used in healthcare and business settings. An Adobe Portfolio file may even look like a single PDF document, with the same file extension (".pdf").
Although convenient, Adobe Portfolio files are not understood correctly by Moodle's document converter, so cannot be used for Student assignment submission.
Work-around: Combine multiple PDFs into one new PDF document
For Moodle assignment submission, the individual PDFs in a Portfolio must be extracted from the PDF Portfolio and recombined into a single PDF document. This is something that Students should do before submission.
Here's how to transform a multi-document PDF Portfolio file into a single combined PDF document:
- View the open Portfolio in Adobe, in the List or Basic Grid view.
- Select all the files in the view on the left.
- Right-click on the list of selected files, and select "Extract from Portfolio".
- Use the "Browse for Folder" dialog to select a destination for all the individual extracted files. (To avoid having dozens of files scattered all over your Desktop, put them all in their own folder; use "Make new folder" to add a folder, and make sure you've clicked on that new folder name so that you see it in the "Folder:" field below).
- Click OK. The extracted PDFs will now all be sitting inside your new folder.
- Open the new folder, select all those files and right-click, and select "Combine files in Acrobat".
- The documents should load up into a "Combine files" window inside Acrobat, showing a thumbnail for each document. Drag them around to set the order (e.g. if there's a title page, drag it to the first position).
- Click the "Combine" button in the top-right to start creating the new PDF that will have all the documents appended together into one document.
- The combiner may give you alert dialogs about duplicate form field names. (Just hit "OK" through any of those...)
- You'll end up with a new document called "Binder"-something in Acrobat. Hit "Save as" and give your new combined PDF a more meaningful name.
- You're done!
That new combined document will be able to be uploaded to a Moodle assignment, and will display properly in Moodle's Annotation/grading interface.