Computer Beginner Guide

The other menu installed with PDFMaker is the Acrobat Comments menu. The commands in the menu address merging your PDF comments back into the original Microsoft Word document. The menu items are as follows: Import Comments from Acrobat . This is a round trip process—that is to say you need to start with an Microsoft Word document, send it out to be reviewed, and then merge the received comments back into the Word file. In addition, when you created the PDF file in the first place, you must use PDFMaker. When you select the menu item, the Import Comments from Adobe Acrobat help window opens. Read the helpful tips on how to import comments and click OK to proceed. The next dialog box that opens is Import Comments from Adobe Acrobat. In the dialog box, you make choices for what files to select, what comments to import, and whether you want to filter the comments. Continue Integration Process . This continues the integration of PDF comments in the Word docume

Of all the Office applications, Microsoft Word gives you the best support for PDF file creation. Microsoft Word is the only word-processing application that provides access to the structural data of the document. The structural data of the Word document such as titles, heads, tables, paragraphs, figure captions, and so on can be converted to tagged Bookmarks. Tagged Bookmarks give you much more control over the PDF content. You can navigate to the element structures, and move, copy, extract, and delete pages through menu commands in the Bookmarks tab. With Word, and all Microsoft Office programs you have several choices for PDF Conversion. You can use the Create PDF From File command, use the Combine Files command, drag and drop Microsoft Office files on the Acrobat Document pane, print to PostScript and convert the PostScript in Acrobat Distiller, and use a tool developed by Adobe called the Acrobat PDFMaker. This tool is installed in all Office programs and several othe

One thing We’ve wanted for a long time as a feature in Acrobat has been the ability to create a PDF document from a template. Many different authoring applications support creating new files from templates, but not Acrobat—at least not the way I want to create a new PDF. You might want to reuse a purchase order form, an invoice form, a vacation leave slip, or other some such document you work with on an ongoing basis. The nice thing about using templates is that they prevent you from inadvertently overwriting the original. Every time you open a template it’s a fresh original; and when you click the Save tool, you’re prompted to type a new name. This feature, as well as having your templates always stored in the same location, helps save time and aggravation. Why hasn’t Adobe added a command like Create PDF >> From Template? The primary reason is that not enough users have asked for this feature. But I’ll bet many others have wanted such a feature in Acrobat, so I’m g

You use the Create PDF From Web Page menu command to convert Web pages to PDF. You can use the command or click the Create PDF From Web page tool in the File toolbar to convert Web pages hosted on Web sites or HTML files stored locally on your computer or networked servers. Web Capture provides a complex set of preferences and tools with different options for converting Web pages, a Web site, or multiple sites to PDF. A captured Web site converts HTML, text files, and images to PDF, and each Web page is appended to the converted document. Conversion to PDF from Web sites can provide many opportunities for archiving information, analyzing data, creating search indexes, and many more uses where information needs to reside locally on computers. Web pages containing animation such as Flash animation can be converted to PDF in Acrobat 6 and later. When animated pages are captured, the animation effects are viewed in the PDF file in any Acrobat viewer. To understand how to ca

Many of the file formats supported by Acrobat can have PDF Options or other settings applied during conversion. These settings are available to all formats except CompuServe GIF, HTML, JDF Job Definition, JPEG2000, and Text. Depending on the file type to be created, you can edit the settings and apply some different options. You edit settings by selecting a file type from those listed in the Preferences dialog box and clicking the Edit Settings button. If the settings cannot be adjusted, the Edit Settings button is grayed out. Settings options for the different file formats include the following: Autodesk AutoCAD and PostScript/EPS . Similar settings are available for these file types as well as many of the Microsoft Office files. One distinction between AutoCAD and PostScript/EPS is that the AutoCAD files can be converted with Bookmarks and Links. The Adobe PDF Settings and Security options are available to both file types. Click the Edit Settings button after sele

There are several attractions to using the Internet to play games. The Internet can make games available to large numbers of users on a round-the-clock basis. The Internet can provide users with the opportunity to build global support communities for particular games and allow direct marketing of game-related items to consumers. It is harder to add Internet capability to a game after it is written than during the design phase. There are several networking issues that must be taken into a count when a multiplayer game is being designed. Session-Oriented Multiplayer Games Not every multiplayer game is amenable to delivery on the Internet. In many ways, turn-based games are easier to deploy than fighting games because of inherent latency problems with Internet communications. Even for turnbased games, designers need to decide whether new players can drop in at any time or whether they can join only at fixed points in the game. In session-oriented multiplayer games, new playe

Online games can be delivered via the Internet or through dedicated game servers on wide area networks with locally installed client software on a player’s personal computer. Single-player games are often accessed directly from a Web site and a player communicates with a game from inside his or her Web browser. Game play for single-user games using a Web browser interface is much like game play for single-user games designed for stand-alone PCs, because the game logic may in fact be running on the local PC and not on the server. To display multimedia content, a user is usually required to have the appropriate media plug-ins installed on his or her personal computer. Standard Web technologies (HTML, Javascript, common gateway interface scripts, or Java) might be used to deliver the game output to the Web browser and to process the player’s input. To communicate with a dedicated game server, the client program may be implemented using any programming language capable of sup

Using any Internet search engine and typing in the search string “computer games,” one is likely to find several million hits. Some sites may simply allow visitors to download games to be installed on their personal computers. Some of these games may be freeware, given away by developers, or they may be shareware, in which developers trust users to send voluntary donations to offset development costs. These games may be free demonstration versions of games that can purchased either online or in local retail stores. Some of these sites also provide support resources for both game players and game developers. Some of these sites may provide visitors with opportunities to play games online without needing to install them on their own personal computers. Many companies make Web-based user support resources available to registered owners of their products. Game companies are no exception. Online registration of products is an option commonly included during the installation of

Programming computers to play games attracted the interest of such computer scientists as Babbage, Turing, and Shannon long before the first personal computers (PCs) came into existence. When personal computers and dedicated game consoles became widely available, in the 1970s, large numbers of computer game titles appeared in the marketplace almost immediately. Some people have argued that the computational expectations of modern computer game players pushed PC hardware manufacturers to increase the multimedia processing power of the home computer. The advent of the Internet and its rapid spread to homes throughout the world similarly has attracted the attention of game designers seeking to create multiplayer games among widely dispersed users. Creating games intended to run on the World Wide Web requires a good understanding of the principles used to design games for stand-alone computers, as well as knowledge about network architecture and client/server computing. The

Developing computer opponents for turn-based games was one of the earliest applications of artificial intelligence (AI) by computer scientists. Many of these early computer opponents make use of a static evaluation function that takes a proposed game state as input and returns a numeric value indicating the value of the position of the state. By applying the static evaluation function to each new game state that is reachable from the current game state, the computer opponent can select the alternative with the best numeric value. The performance of computer opponents can be improved by looking ahead two or more moves before applying the static evaluation function. An algorithm like minimax is used to combine the results of the “look ahead” moves (recognizing the fact that each player will be looking for the best move possible). Another task confronting opponents in combat or sports games is path finding through the game objects displayed on the screen. Nothing exposes wea

Not every game lends itself easily to online play. Multiplayer games in which players take turns moving and single-player games in which players complete against a computer opponent possessing artificial intelligence seem to be the easiest to adapt to Internet play. One reason for choosing to play a game on the Internet is to experience the interaction with game players around the world. The key to developing a good game is to give players interesting challenges to overcome. The solutions to these challenges should be intuitive to the players and should gradually increase in difficulty. This allows a game to be learned as the player’s skill increases. A game that produces random results for a given input may not be perceived as an entertaining game. Genre. The term genre, as used in this chapter, describes a game type. There are many types of computer games. Use of the term genre is a bit controversial among game designers. Some game designers do not believe it is possib

Sometimes features added to programs are hidden in menu command and may be undocumented. When Acrobat 7 was introduced, a menu command was added to create a new PDF document from within Acrobat. I missed this addition in Acrobat 7 because it was so obscure and it never occurred to me that the command existed. To create a blank new page in Acrobat 7, press the Shift key on your keyboard and select File >> Create PDF >> From Blank Page. In Acrobat 8 the menu command to create a blank new page is not obscure and appears in the File >> Create PDF submenu. Select File >> Create PDF >> From Blank Page and a new blank page opens in the Document pane. Note that you must select the File >> Create PDF menu command for From Blank Page to appear. Using the Create PDF task button menu won’t get you the option to create a new document. When you select the command, a single-page PDF is created. The page appears as a portrait standard lettersize page

Unlike almost every other computer program, Acrobat was never designed to support creating new files and editing pages to add content. Where Acrobat begins is with file conversion to the PDF format. Users start with a document authored in another program and the resulting document is converted to PDF using either tools from within Acrobat or tools or commands within programs that support PDF conversion from native documents. With Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Professional, the number of methods you can employ for converting documents to PDF is enormous. Any program file can be converted to PDF through a number of different methods offered by Acrobat, operating systems, and many different authoring applications. The method you use to convert a document to PDF and the purpose for which the PDF is intended require you to become familiar with a number of different options at your disposal for PDF file creation. You create PDF documents from within Acrobat primarily with defaul

One reason you create index files is for speed. When you search hundreds or thousands of pages, the amount of time to return found instances for searched words in index files is a matter of seconds compared to Searching folders in the Search window. To search using an index file, you need to first load the index in the Search window. From the Look In pulldown menu, choose the Select Index menu option. The Index Selection dialog box opens after you make the menu selection. Click the Add button and the Open Index File dialog box opens. In this dialog box navigate your hard drive to find the folder where your index file is located. Click the index filename and click the Open button. After selecting the index to load, you are returned to the Index Selection dialog box. A list of all loaded indexes appears in the dialog box. To the left of each filename is a check box. When a check mark is in view, the index file is active and can be searched. Those check boxes that are dis

After your files are optimized and saved in final form, it’s time to create the search index. Choose Advanced >> Document Processing >> Full Text Index with Catalog to open the Catalog dialog box. In the dialog box you make choices for creating a new index file or opening an existing index file. Click the New Index button to create a new index file. The New Index Definition dialog box shown in Figure below opens, in which you set specific attributes for your index and determine what folder(s) are to be indexed. Index Title The title that you place in this field is a title for the index, but not necessarily the name of the file you ultimately save. The name you enter here does not need to conform to any naming conventions because in most cases it won’t be the saved filename. When you open an index file, you search your hard drive, server, or external media for a filename that ends with a .pdx extension. When you visit the Search window and select Look In >

In order to search an index file, you must have one present on your computer, network server, some media storage device, or embedded in a PDF. When you install an Acrobat viewer, a help index file is included during your installation. You can use this file to search for words contained in any of the help documents. If you want to search your own files, you need to create an index. To create an index file, you use Acrobat Catalog. Acrobat Catalog is available only in Acrobat Professional. Search indexes can be used by all Acrobat viewers including Adobe Reader. To launch Acrobat Catalog from within Acrobat Professional choose Advanced >> Document Processing >> Full Text Index with Catalog. Catalog is robust and provides many options for creating and modifying indexes. After a search index is created, any user can access the search index in all Acrobat viewers to find words using the Search window. However, before you begin to work with Acrobat Catalog, you need