Acrobat Hands-On Tutorial

http://www.uic.edu/depts/accc/seminars/acrobat/pdf-worksheet.html

BasicsAcrobat 4 box

  1. As a first step in creating a PDF document, please use your browser and print this document via the PDFwriter. Use File > Print and choose Acrobat PDFwriter from the drop-down list of available printers. Click Settings to see the available settings for PDFwriter.
  2. As a second step, we want to beautify this document a bit for printing. Save this file to your desktop and launch Microsoft Word. Open this document in Word and save it in Microsoft Word format.
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  3. Then make some formatting changes in Word, such as using different fonts, sizes and colors, correcting tipographycal errors (sic!), using full justification and setting a different paper size, e.g. legal. You may also wish to set up double column layout. Don't spend more than 5 minutes on this!
  4. Using PDFmaker: use File > Create Adobe PDF in Word to convert the file to PDF format via the Acrobat Distiller (you can also use the Acrobat button in the toolbar). Do not use PDFwriter here, or some of the special features of the PDFmaker macro will not work! If you are using Word97, the HTML tags will be treated as Word Styles. We want to ensure that the headings produce entries in the PDF table of contents, so in PDFmaker's menu, select the Bookmarks tab and make sure Word Styles is checked. Place a checkmark into the boxes for H1 through H6 to ensure that HTML headings will be converted to bookmarks (navigational items in the PDF file's table of contents).
  5. Viewing the resulting PDF file in Acrobat, notice how your formatting changes have been exactly preserved. However, there's more. Click on the leftmost button at the bottom (a double arrow symbol) or choose Window > Show Bookmarks to split your window, showing the table of contents in the left pane. Every item in that pane is a clickable link called a bookmark, some of which will change your view of the document in the right pane. Other items are regular weblinks and will open a page in your webbrowser (unless your Acrobat web-capture default has been set to append those pages to the current document).
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Editing the PDF file in Acrobat

  1. Bookmarks: Some bookmarks have been created automatically for you by PDFmaker, a macro installed into Microsoft Word by the Acrobat installer. However, you may wish to add more bookmarks and move the existing ones around. If you have created a PDF document in any other way, it will not contain any bookmarks at all at this point. So let us now create a new bookmark. Right-click in the bookmarks (left) pane and choose New Bookmark from the popup menu. Name it Using PDFmaker  or something similar. Now use the magnifying glass on the left to drag a rectangle over the PDFmaker paragraph (number 3 above). If you let go in the wrong place, simply use the back arrow in the top toolbar to return to the previous view. Now to set the go-to-view action on the bookmark, right-click it and choose Set Destination. Drag the bookmark to the desired place and indentation (you will see a little black line where it will be placed).
  2. Hyperlinks: The PDFmaker may have placed the active areas for the hyperlinks in this document in the wrong location - you will see little rectangles on the right indicating those. To drag them to the right place, select the link tool, a little chainlink icon on the left. With this tool selected, you can also edit the URL associated with a hyperlink by right-clicking on the link rectangle and choosing Properties. Part of that menu also allows changing the display mode of the active area. Set it to invisible rectangle as the blue, underlined style of the text is sufficient indication that it is a hyperlink.
  3. Thumbnails: The left pane has various tabs at the top. The second one is named Thumbnails. Click it to see small icons for each page in the document. Right-click the pane and choose Create All Thumbnails to make little graphical representations of each page. This is helpful for quickly navigating through the document, and even more so for re-arranging pages and deleting entire pages from the document. Double-click a thumbnail to go to that page, then use the Back button (Go to Previous View) to return.
  4. Comments: Among Acrobat's strongest points are its document review features. Let us create some comments and annotations for the document. Use the comment tool (a little sticky note icon) on the left and click anywhere to insert a note there. You can also drag out the size of the comment window. Type in your comment, then close the note. Right-click it to change its display properties, e.g. to a green speech bubble. To get a quick overview of all such annotations in your document, use the Annotations tab in the left pane.
  5. Touching up text: You can edit text within a line, change its color, font, size, and even kerning via the text touchup tool. It is the T icon at the bottom of your Acrobat toolbox. Only editing within a line is possible. Careful - Acrobat has only a single undo step!

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