Acrobat 1 worksheet

Visit this seminar's website at http://www.accc.uic.edu/seminars/acrobat/

Navigating PDF files efficiently

  1. Go to the Handouts section and open the Bookmarks tutorial under PDF Files. We will browse this PDF file via the Acrobat Reader browser plugin.
  2. When scrolling up and down through the document, notice that you see only one page at a time. This is due to the single page layout setting. To switch to continuous display, use the little page icon near the right end of the statusbar at the bottom:
  3. Get a quick overview of the entire page, then switch to 100% view via the quick access buttons at the top: The most useful of these is typically the right one, Fit Width. If things are not very legible at these sizes, use the zoom tool to magnify an area: simply click or drag out a marquee. Notice the little black triangle in the tool's bottom right corner (Acrobat 3 or 4) or to the right of the button (Acrobat 5 or 6). This indicates in all Adobe programs that another tool is hiding behind this one, in this case the zoom-out tool . In Acrobat 5, all these hidden tools have been re-arranged to multiple toolbars for quicker access. . They are by default still hidden, but you can expand a group of tools with the drop-down menu beside them.
  4. Want to get back to your previous place? Use the Previous View and Next View buttons, just as in a web browser: . Or quickly go to a specific page by typing its number into the statusbar. Go to page 4.
  5. Use the hand tool to drag the paper around, i.e. to move the page up, down, left, or right. This grabber hand will change into a pointing finger if you hold the mouse over a link, just as on the web. What happens if you click?
  6. Sometimes you will notice yet another cursor: This indicates that you are reading an article stretching over several parts of the document. Simply clicking will advance you through it, no need to scroll. Especially useful in multi-column documents! Move through the entire article in the sample document. What happens at its end?
  7. On the left, a table of contents is displayed. This is the Bookmarks pane. Clicking on a bookmark can take you to a different place in the document, or to a different view (e.g. magnification). Play with those you see on the left. What do they do? Bookmarks can also open web pages, launch other files, or execute menu items. Their best application is a table of contents, which we will learn to auto-create from Word documents. To make your document bigger, hide the bookmarks pane via the navigation panes toggle , or in Acrobat 5 simply fold it away by clicking on the bookmarks tab at the left.
  8. Want to get text out of a PDF? Use the text-select tool . There are hidden tools for selecting entire columns or an image snapshot of any rectangle. The fornatted text tool (good e.g. for tables) is only available in the full program running stand-alone, not in the browser plugin. Copy and paste your selection into any application (e.g. MS Word).
  9. Looking for a specific term in the file? Use the find tool to search for "bookmark". The next button lets you repeat the search (Find Again).
  10. Now let us save the document. From the browser plugin, you must use the Save button . Similarly, to print the file, use Acrobat's print button , not the browser's! If the print button is grayed out, printing this file has been disabled via Acrobat's security settings. To check those settings, click the key icon in the status bar (if there's none, security is off).
  11. Click the little black triangle at the top of the vertical scrollbar. A sub-menu opens, called the palette menu - yet another Adobe-typical trick. You find a Document Summary here, plus the Preferences. Setting Preferences is always an important step in making an application your own. Recommendation: set the default page display to Fit Width, and the default layout to Continuous. When on a slow connection, you may want to turn off Display large images to speed up download of PDFs where you are mostly interested in the text (or when you need to scroll a lot and have a slow PC).

Creating PDF from any application

  1. Again on the handouts page, open this document, Acrobat 1 worksheet. Print it from the browser, choosing the Acrobat PDFwriter as printer (in Acrobat 5 no longer installed by default). Click on Properties in the print dialogue. We will walk through these options.
  2. You will be prompted for a filename. Make sure to select here to view the file. You may also want to provide a title and author's name via Document Info. Click OK. You just made a PDF file. Easy, no? You can do this from any application that can print!
  3. Back in the browser, save the worksheet to the desktop (in Netscape, you first need to choose Edit Page, then File > Save from within Netscape Composer, or you will lose the images).
  4. Open the document you just saved (pdf-worksheet1.html) in MS Word. Save it as Word document (with the .doc extension).
  5. Make some editing changes, e.g. choose different colors, sizes and fonts to see how the conversion to PDF preserves all of these. Add complex formatting to your liking, e.g. use full justification, put some text into a box or use columns. Save the document.
  6. Using PDFwriter would still preserve all of this, but let us print via Acrobat Distiller this time. Notice how Properties gives us a few typical PostScript printer options, plus a tab labeled PDF Settings. Here you choose job options according to your target output - for web delivery choose Screen.
  7. Notice that the URLs in the document did retain their blue and underlined design, but they are not active links. To make an active link in Acrobat, use the link tool and drag a rectangle over the link-text, then type in the URL you want the link to point to. Way too tedious in the long run, if you had already done this work in the source document!
  8. But in Word, you have a better tool: PDFmaker (= File > Create Adobe PDF) . This is a macro that uses Distiller to maintain all of the document structure, links, headings for the TOC, footnotes etc. during the conversion to PDF format. Note that you can even configure Distiller directly from here, up to the choice of job options.
  9. You can choose what part of the structure to preserve. Check everything under Output, and set the target magnification to Inherit Zoom.
  10. On the Bookmarks tab, check Word Headings and Word Styles. If using Word 97, you should check the H1-H6 checkboxes to have bookmarks made from those headings (recall: we started with an HTML page, so these styles are actually in use in the document). Word 2000 no longer differentiates between Word headings and HTML headings. You may want to use Fit Visible as target magnification, which will avoid wasting display space for margins.
  11. On the Display Options tab, set the opening magnification to Fit Width. Set hyperlink display to invisible rectangle, as those links are already blue and underlined. Definitely choose to open the document with bookmarks - that's why we are making these!
  12. Click Create and watch PDFmaker at work. When Distiller has finally finished, you should get a nice interactive PDF file with active hyperlinks and bookmarks. Note: Word2000 users - if Distiller stalls at "Starting Job...", you probably were still in web layout mode. Switch in the View menu to Normal View and everything should be fine.
  13. Open the Sample PowerPoint Presentation from the Handouts section on the seminar pages in PowerPoint (save it to the desktop first). Convert it to a PDF presentation via the PDFmaker macro . This even creates bookmarks from your slide outline! This is a great way of distributing PowerPoints. Suggestion: disable printing on this PDF, and make another PDF with handout pages (or outline only) by printing to Distiller from PowerPoint.

Annotating PDF

  1. The main comment tool is the sticky note . Use it to add some comments to the document you created in the previous step. Fold up the comment (click box in top left corner), then double-click the note icon to open your comment again. Resize the comment box until you like its looks. Drag the comment away from the note icon and place both independently where they do not disturb the main document. Can you quickly get it back?
  2. Right-click the note tool icon and choose Annotation Preferences to specify your name and choose a font. Then choose Properties to select different icons and colors.
  3. To add comments without fancy icons, use the text-comment tool (hidden behind the note tool ).Text comments can be partially transparent (only overwrite things with large fonts!). They always show and cannot be closed like other comments. Other text-oriented tools are the highlighter , strikeout and underline tools. Give them a try, and use different colors. What happens if you double-click one of these markings?
  4. Want to highlight an area? Draw something? Cancel out an entire paragraph? Use the line-oriented tools below the note tool: pencil , line, and shapes . This is how the circles in the bookmarks tutorial were created.
  5. Behind the note tool, three more tools are hiding: the first lets you record voice annotations with any microphone plugged into your soundcard (watch the file size!). The second can rubber-stamp your documents for some glitz, and the third lets you embed (attach) entire files. Try this!
  6. The Comments tab provides an overview of all the annotations made on the document. Comments can be sorted by type, author, date, or page number. Good for multiple reviewers.
  7. The Acrobat file menu also lets you export comments to FDF format (or import some). These comments are not readable by themselves, they have to be imported into the original PDF document. This is useful e.g. to import comments from multiple simultaneous reviewers into one comprehensive document, so that when you have several students review a paper you can collect all their comments here. Or you could have students take comment-notes on a PDF during a live lecture in a lab (or with laptops), then ask them to submit the FDF files to you.

Accessibility

For users of screen readers, there are two options to read PDF files: the Make Accessible plugin for Acrobat is a separate download from the Adobe website that allows tagging a PDF file to allow a screen reader to determine the proper reading sequence. This also enables reflowing a PDF for portable devices with their small screen sizes. PDFmaker for MS Office 2000/XP (but not for Office 97) automatically creates tagged PDF files (leave Page labels turned off!).

The other option is the PDF-to-HTML converter at the Access Adobe website. Go there and check this out - you find it under Related Links for this seminar. Older PDF documents (version 3 and older) do not work well with this and should be converted. There are other possible problems due to complex layouts - see the accessibility handout.