Computer Beginner Guide

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...