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...

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...

Mac OS X and Adobe PDF are married at the operating system level and you can find several ways to convert your authoring files to the PDF format. The Acrobat-supported method uses the same type of printer driver you find on Windows. From any authoring program, select the Print command (most commonly accessed by choosing File >> Print). When the Print dialog box opens, select Adobe PDF 8.0 from the Printer pull-down menu. From the default selection for Copies and Pages, open the pull-down menu and select PDF Options. The dialog box changes so that you can access Adobe PDF Settings from a pull-down menu. The default selection is Use Default. If you leave this option active, the most recent settings selected in the Distiller application are used to produce the PDF file. The remaining options are the same as those discussed for Windows users. When you add new custom settings, they appear in the Adobe PDF Settings pull-down menus from the Print dialog boxes on Windows...

When you install Acrobat Professional or Acrobat Standard, the Adobe PDF printer is installed in your Printers folder. As a printer driver, the file is accessible from any program capable of printing, including your computer accessories and utilities. Like any other printer you install on Windows 2000 with Service Pak 4, Windows XP Professional, Windows XP Home Edition, or Tablet PC with Service Pak 2, you can set the Adobe PDF printer as the default printer. Once set as the default printer, you don’t need to make a printer selection each time you want to create a PDF document. You may also have the Acrobat Distiller printer installed in your Printer’s folder. The features associated with the Adobe PDF printer and the Acrobat Distiller printer are identical. To convert any application document to PDF, choose File >> Print or access the Print dialog box with the menu command in your authoring program. Some dedicated vertical market programs, such as accounting and ot...

Index files can be scattered all over your hard drive and, at times, it can be a chore to load them in the Index selection dialog box. In addition, when sharing PDFs where indexes have been created requires you to either attach an index file to a PDF or send along your index to recipients of your PDFs. Again, the steps involved can be aggravating if you have to spend time finding the index files on your hard drive. Acrobat 8 has simplified the steps for loading index files and sharing them. Now in Acrobat 8 you can embed an index file in PDFs. Embedding an index file is limited to a single PDF document and not a collection of PDFs. Therefore, it makes sense to embed an index file in a document having many pages or in PDF Packages. You won’t gain any better performance embedding indexes in one page PDFs or files containing few pages. When you embed an index file you bypass all the steps for creating an index using Acrobat Catalog. Indexes are automatically created and embed...

A computer network server, another computer on your network, a CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, external hard drive, and a removable media cartridge are considered external to your local computer hard drive(s). Any of these devices can be indexed and the index file can be located on any of the devices you index. If you want to save an index file on a device different from where the PDF collection is stored, you need to be certain to open the Preferences dialog box for the Catalog preferences and enable the check box for Allow indexing on separate drives. This preference setting enables you to index across media devices. When you want to write index files to read only media such as CD-ROMs and DVDs, you need to create the index file from PDFs stored on your hard drive. After the index file is created, copy the index file, the supporting files, and the PDFs to your media and burn the disc. When you want to search an index, you can activate the index in the Index selection dialog box and in...

Catalog preference settings are contained in the Preferences dialog box. Choose Edit >> Preferences and click the Catalog item in the left pane. Notice that the Index Defaults items use the same settings as found in the Options dialog box from the New Index Selection dialog box. The top three options under Indexing in Catalog preferences are obtained only here in these preference settings. The three options found in the Indexing section of the Catalog preferences are as follows: Allow indexing on separate drives . When creating index files where you want to include folders on network servers and/or computers on your network, select this item in the Catalog preferences. The indexing option includes indexing files only on local networks. Unfortunately, you can’t index files on Web servers and use indexes from within Web browsers. Force ISO 9660 compatibility on folders . This setting is a flag that tells Catalog to look for any folders that are not compliant with...

After you’ve set all the attributes for the index definition, the index file is ready to be created. Clicking the Build button in the New Index Definition dialog box creates indexes. When you click this button, Acrobat Catalog opens the Save Index File dialog box where you supply a filename and target a destination on your hard drive. The default file extension is .pdx. Do not modify the file extension name. Acrobat recognizes these files when loading search indexes. The location where you instruct Catalog to save your index file can be any location on your hard drive regardless of where the files being indexed reside. You can choose to save the index file inside or outside the folder that Catalog created during the indexing. Therefore you have an index file and a folder containing index resources. The relationship between the index file and resource folder locations is critical to the usability of the index. If you move the index file to a different location without movin...

To the right of the Index Description field is a button labeled Options. Click this button and the Options dialog box appears, allowing you to choose from a number of different attributes for your index file. Some of these options are similar to the Preference settings for Acrobat Catalog you made in the Preferences dialog box. Any edits you make here supersede Preference settings. Do Not Include Numbers The first item in the Options dialog box is a check box for excluding numbers. By selecting the Do not include numbers option, you can reduce the file size, especially if data containing many numbers are part of the PDF file(s) to be indexed. Keep in mind, however, that if numbers are excluded, Search won’t find numeric values. Add IDs to Adobe v1.0 files Because Acrobat is now in version 8.0, finding old PDF 1.0 files that need to be updated with IDs may rarely happen. If you do have legacy files saved as PDF 1.0 format, it would be best to batch process the older PDFs b...

What has been covered so far is information about finding content in PDF documents with a very elaborate find feature in Acrobat. The name used in Acrobat to refer to what has been discussed so far is “Search.” Users of earlier versions of Acrobat may take this to mean using Acrobat Search as it was used in Acrobat viewers earlier than version 6.0. What has been covered thus far, however, is a Search of data files that was greatly improved in Acrobat version 6 and is more powerful in returning results in Acrobat version 8. To understand the difference between the preceding pages and what follows requires a little explanation. In addition to full-text searches for documents, you can also create a separate index file and search one or more indexes at a time. Index files provide some benefit in that they are still a little faster than full-text searches, can be automatically assigned to PDF documents in the Advanced tab in the Document Properties, and can be automatically loa...

Document descriptions are user-supplied data fields used to help you identify PDF files according to title, subject, author, and keywords. At the time you create a PDF document, you may have options for supplying a document description. In other cases, you may add descriptions in Acrobat either individually or with Acrobat’s batch processing features. After you add descriptions and save your files, the data added to these fields are searchable via advanced searches and index file searches. Developing an organized workflow with specific guidelines for users to follow regarding document descriptions significantly helps all your colleagues search PDFs much more efficiently. To add a document description, choose File >> Document Properties. When the Document Properties dialog box opens, click the Description tab. The four fields for document descriptions are as follows: Title . The Title field in this example contains a description of a form. Other forms in a company...