Computer Beginner Guide

In an Acrobat viewer, hypertext references enable you to move around the PDF or many PDFs, much like surfing the Net. You’ve probably become so accustomed to clicking buttons on your desktop computer that link navigation is commonplace and needs little instruction. While invoking the action is nothing more than a click with the mouse, what it can do in Acrobat is simply remarkable. To help you gain an understanding of how Acrobat has employed hyperlinks, the following sections describe all the link actions as they can be created in Acrobat and executed in any viewer. Hypertext references, or buttons, are easily identified in a PDF document. As you move the mouse cursor around the document window, a Hand icon with the forefinger pointing appears when you position the cursor over a button or a link. You click, and presto!—the link action is executed! Link actions can be assigned to any one of several items in Acrobat. All the Link Action types are available with both Acrobat

You can save layered Illustrator CS files to PDF with Adobe PDF Layers. Creating layered PDF documents from Illustrator is supported in Illustrator CS version 1 and above. To create PDF layers you need an authoring program capable of creating layers and capable of saving or exporting to PDF 1.5 format (Acrobat 6 compatibility) and above—Illustrator CS does both. When saving files with layers to PDF with Adobe PDF Layers, create the default layer view you want to appear in Acrobat. As shown in Figure 2, two layers in an Illustrator file are hidden and three layers are visible. The layer visibility you see in Illustrator is the same visibility you’ll see in Acrobat when saving as PDF. In Illustrator, choose File > Save or Save As and select PDF as the format. In the Adobe PDF Options dialog box select Acrobat 6 or greater compatibility and check the box for Create Acrobat Layers from Top-Level Layers. If the box is not checked, you won’t see layers in the resultant PDF

Quite often, with just about any application, users find ways to work with a program in a manner that was not intended by a developer. This is most apparent when looking at the way designers use Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator was created for artists who needed an electronic artboard to create illustrations and drawings. But when the program got to the hands of the graphic artists, it was frequently used as a page layout program. For years graphic artists pleaded with Adobe to offer support for multiple pages. No matter how many rich features were added to Adobe InDesign (which was created as a page layout program), the die-hard Illustrator users never abandoned their favorite tool. Today, great numbers of designers still first grab Illustrator to create page layouts. It wasn’t until Illustrator CS2 was released that Adobe responded. Perhaps not completely the way designers wanted to work with multiple pages, but in part, Illustrator now supports multiple pages. The only w

All the features for Photoshop discussed thus far are derived from the top-level menu commands directly in Photoshop. You can also use Adobe Bridge to convert image files to PDF. Among options you find in Adobe Bridge is a command for converting image files to a PDF Presentation. In the Bridge window you can select files to choose in your presentation, invoke a menu command and Photoshop does the work to create a presentation complete with slide transitions and user defined time intervals. If you have Photoshop you also have Adobe Bridge. Open Adobe Bridge and follow the steps below to create a presentation. Select image files to include in a PDF Presentation. Open Adobe Bridge and open the folder containing images you want to include in a presentation. You can add files from other folders, but your task is a little easier if you first copy all the files you want to include in the presentation to a common folder. Select Tools > Photoshop > PDF Presentation. Wi

Photoshop provides a number of choices for the color mode used to express your image. You can open files from different color modes, convert color modes in Photoshop, and save among different formats available for a given color mode. File formats are dependent on color modes, and some format options are not available if the image data are defined in a mode not acceptable to the format. Color mode choices in Photoshop include the following: Bitmap. The image is expressed in two colors: black and white. In Photoshop terms, images in the bitmap mode are referred to as line art. In Acrobat terms, this color mode is called monochrome bitmap. Bitmap images are usually about one-eighth the size of a grayscale file. The bitmap format can be used with Acrobat Capture for converting the image data to rich text. Grayscale. This is your anchor mode in Photoshop. Grayscale is like a black-and-white photo, a halftone, or a Charlie Chaplin movie. You see grayscale images everywhe

Microsoft Word is first and foremost a word processing program. In as much as many features have been added to the program to take it well beyond simple word processing, the program is not designed to be a layout program. Word lacks support for many features you find with layout programs such as supporting color management, printing color separations, controlling halftone frequency, and more. As a matter of practice you should avoid creating files for press, and in particular for color separations, in Word. If it’s an absolute must that you need to use Word for commercial printing, then you need to be aware of some things to avoid. These items include the following: Use RGB images . Be certain to not use Indexed color images in your Word files. Make certain all your images are edited and saved in an RGB color space and let the RGB to CMYK conversion take place at the time the files are printed. Use TIFF format for raster images . Avoid using GIF, JPG, PNG, PCX, PICT

Regardless of whether your files are formatted for custom page sizes or standard page sizes, you need to add crop marks if your files are going to be printed on offset press or many on-demand printing devices. For some on-demand equipment such as Xerox DocuTechs and other devices that print on single sheet standard page sizes, you won’t need to add crop marks. When crop marks are needed for printing your files, follow these steps to add crop marks in Acrobat: Open a document in Acrobat Professional . For these steps you need Acrobat Professional. Acrobat Standard does not have a Print Production toolbar. Open the Print Production toolbar . Open a context menu on the Acrobat Toolbar Well and select Print Production to open the Print Production toolbar. The Printer’s Marks tool and the Crop tool are needed to add printer’s marks to your document. Add Printer’s Marks . Click the Add Printer’s Marks tool in the Print Production toolbar and the Add Printer’s Marks dialo

Windows users have an elaborate set of conversion settings they can address in menu commands when PDFMaker is installed on Windows. Macintosh users may look for the menus I mention, but they won’t find them in OS X. Conversion settings for Macintosh users are much more limited than their Windows cousins and you need to choose your conversion options, as much as can be done, in the Distiller Adobe PDF settings. When converting to PDF on the Macintosh, the PDFMaker uses a printer driver. As your first step in using the PDFMaker, open your Printer Setup Utility and select a PostScript printer. You can also select an Adobe PDF printer. Click the Make Default icon in the Printer Setup Utility to establish the selected printer as the default. If you select a desktop color printer or other non-PostScript device you may see unexpected results in the PDFs created with the PDFMaker. PDFMaker prints Word documents to disk and then converts them through Distiller’s Adobe PDF Setti

To begin capturing Web pages, select From Web Page in the Create PDF task button pull-down menu, click the Create PDF from Web Page tool, or choose File >> Create PDF >> From Web Page. The Create PDF from Web Page dialog box opens. In the Create PDF from Web Page dialog box, various settings determine many different attributes for how a Web page is converted to PDF and how it appears in the Acrobat Document pane. The first level of controls is handled in the Create PDF from Web Page dialog box. Additional buttons in this dialog box open other dialog boxes where you apply many more settings. If this is your first attempt at capturing a Web page, then leave the default values in the dialog box, and supply a URL in the URL field box. Click the Create button and watch the page appear in Acrobat. Be certain the Levels field box is set to 1 on your first attempt. Entering any other value may keep you waiting for some time depending on how many pages download from

Suppose you have a map contained as part of a layout and you want to clip out the map and send it off to a friend for directions to an event, or perhaps you want to take a screenshot of an FTP client application to show log-on instructions, or maybe you want to clarify the use of a dialog box in Acrobat or another application. All of these examples and many more are excellent candidates for screen captures. To capture a screenshot of the entire monitor screen in Windows, press the Shift+PrtScrn (Print Screen) or PrtSc keys. The keystrokes copy the current view of your monitor to the Clipboard. You can launch Acrobat or maximize it and select From Clipboard Image from the Create PDF task button pull-down menu. The Clipboard data opens as a PDF document in the Acrobat Document pane. If you have a menu or dialog box open, the screen capture includes the foreground items in the capture. Screens captured on Windows through these methods create 96 ppi (pixels per inch) images;

Adobe Acrobat, both Standard and Professional, offer you a number of options for converting application documents to PDF. For PDF creation supported by Acrobat, you don’t need to leave the program to produce PDF files from a number of different file formats. The Create PDF task button pull-down menu offers several different options for PDF creation. You use the first two menu options, From File and From Multiple Files, to convert files saved from authoring documents to the PDF format. Converting to PDF with either of these commands requires you to access files supported by Acrobat’s Create PDF option. Although the number of file formats supported by Acrobat through the internal conversion process is greatly expanded in version 7.0, not all files can be converted with the Create PDF tool or menu option. You can also convert any file compatible with the Create PDF >> From File menu command by dragging a document on top of the Acrobat window. To convert files to PD