Acrobat 2 worksheet

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

Acquisition topics

Web Capture:

1. Via Acrobat's web-capture tool, we want to capture the seminar website, 2 levels deep, staying within the same path (that implies staying on the same server). But first click on Conversion Settings.
2. Check all the boxes - adding PDF structure helps making the document more accessible and prepares it for reflowing on small screens (available in Acrobat 5 only). On the Page Layout tab, choose Letter format and set a one-inch margin. Back on the main tab, you can choose options for all supported formats, in this case HTML. Click on this to choose your preferred colors and fonts.
3. If you are not happy with the results, throw the document away and start over with different settings. Note that this feature does not (yet) support authenticated/secured pages.
4. As we captured only two levels, all pages more than one click away from the start page have not been captured. Hovering over the link to one of them, the mouse cursor changes to indicate that this link can be captured and added to the current document. Right-click one of those links and choose "Append to document". The page gets appended at the bottom - we will later see how to re-arrange that. For now, save the document.
5. When making it, all hyperlinks were preserved. Some of them point to other pages within the same PDF document, others are web-links that can be appended to the current document. Use Tools > Web Capture > Web Links to see all of them. You can also append entirely new webpages via Tools > Web Capture > Append Webpage. Append your (or your institution's) homepage to your current document and save it.
   
   Paper Capture:
   
   
6. Another important method for creating PDF is scanning paper documents. You can scan (via a TWAIN driver) directly from Acrobat, or import a TIFF file produced by a scanner. However, this produces large files with pixel information, no searchable text. To convert this to a lean and mean text-based PDF, an optical character recognition (OCR) step has to be performed. Acrobat calls this Paper Capture, which requires a separate plugin download that will be placed in the Tools menu. Let's open a PDF file that has just been scanned and try the paper capture on it: this seminar's handouts page has a (bad) sample file called Demo file for OCR.
7. After you run the main step of text recognition, you will have to manually revise the pieces where Acrobat isn't quite sure that it recognized things properly. On documents with a lot of tables, like tax forms, this gets tedious because a lot of the lines are interpreted as characters, confusing Acrobat. Also, some actual text may be interpreted as graphics - this is largely dependent on the quality of the initial scan. We will just do a little bit: select Show Suspects from the Tools > TouchUp Text menu, then Tools > Paper Capture. When the capture is complete, hit Ctrl-H to find the first suspect. If you like what Acrobat thought, hit TAB, otherwise type over to correct it, then hit TAB to commit this change.
8. Use File > Save As... to save your file with a different name. Compare the file size of the original document with yours after the OCR step. You can get huge savings with this step, plus it makes the text in your document accessible to screen readers, searchable, and selectable for copying/exporting. So it is worth the effort of OCR. However, notice that the choice of fonts is not uniform - each word has its own font settings. That means it is often better to do OCR with a specialized OCR program such as Omnipage, bring the text into a word processor, format it properly again, and then print to PDF. If you can gain access to the original source document, re-creating the PDF from there is of course the far better option.

Adding Interactivity

1. Re-open the PDF you captured from these seminar pages. Inspect some of the existing links with the link tool - right-click the rectangles and choose Attributes.
2. Drag a rectangle over some text and make this a world-wide-web link, specifying e.g. the URL for FSI. Choose to display a visible blue rectangle for now (default). Switch to the hand tool to test the link (open the page in the browser).
3. On the first page, use the touch-up-text tool to change the word ITL in the left table of links to the word Home. Now use the link tool and double-click the Home link to change were it points. Instead of pointing to the ITL homepage (a weblink), we want this to point to the page you just appended. The desired action is Go To View. With the dialog box still open, scroll to the last page (the one you just appended) and choose a magnification you like (suggestion: Fit View), then click the Set Destination button. Test the link, then go back to the previous view .
4. All actions available for hyperlinks are also available for bookmarks, the table of contents in the left pane. Re-open the Bookmarks tutorial document from the first workshop. Select some text that you find important with the select-text tool and type Ctrl-B or click New Bookmark from the palette menu in the bookmarks pane. A bookmark titled by the text you selected is created. Test it by going to some other page at a different magnification, then clicking on the new bookmark.
5. Perhaps we should have this bookmark take us really up-close. With the zoom tool , drag a rectangle over the interesting text, leaving just a bit of context. Once you are happy with the view, right-click the bookmark and choose Set Destination.
6. The PDFmaker macro for Word 97/2000 makes automatic bookmarks from your headings (and/or styles of your choice). However, the magnification is set the same for all of them and you may want to change some of those. Also, different heading levels produce indentation levels, requiring some re-arrangement of bookmarks. Drag around some bookmarks and experiment with indentation. The little black underline indicates where the bookmark will be dropped (together with its child bookmarks).
7. Experiment with different magnification levels for some bookmarks. Always test the effect by going to another place at a different zoom level, then clicking the bookmark.
8. Bookmarks made by capturing webpages are always set to the magnification Inherit Zoom, meaning that you will stay at your current zoom level when clicking them. If you change this, their status as web-bookmarks is lost and their icon changes.
9. Bookmarks can also execute menu items, such as Document Info. This is mostly useful when a PDF document is set to open without menus, to make only a few select commands available to the user.
10. Both bookmarks and hyperlinks can open external documents (they are expected to remain in that same relative location - good e.g. for a CD-Rom). This is different from the file annotation tool which embeds files. Make a bookmark that will launch the Seminar Evaluation Form document. Try it - your current document closes!

Refining the document

1. The hyperlink we made before looks really ugly. Switch it to an invisible rectangle (via the link tool). We want to make the text blue and underlined instead. Use the touch-up-text tool to select just this text, then right-click and choose Attributes. Click on the color well and pick blue as text color, then close the box. Note that there is no way to make the text really underlined, but we can simply use the underlining comment tool as a workaround (it hides behind the highlighter tool ).
2. If we have a hyperlink from body-text to other areas within the same document, a good way to make them stand out is the highlighter tool. Sample uses: see Bookmarks tutorial document.
3. Printing webpages allows no control over page breaks, and Acrobat's web capture is no better, although Acrobat will scale objects to fit on your page. But sometimes you would really like a line of text to stay with the graphic it is describing. You can use the object select tool (hidden behind the touch-up-text tool ) to move them. Click a line of text with it. If it contains underlines, Shift-Click to also select those, or simply drag over the entire group of things you want to move. Caution: notice the outline indicating all selected objects - it is often surprising what items Acrobat has grouped together!
4. Right-click the selected group and choose Cut. Right-click on the next page, then select Paste in Front from the context menu. The objects appear at the bottom of the page, in the same location they had on the previous page, and you can now drag them around, or use the cursor keys, to move them into place. Before doing all this, you should have made space for them at the top of this page.
5. You can also insert new text with the touch-up-text tool . Just Ctrl-Click with it where you want the new line to start. Type a line, then move it around with the black triangles at its left end. Stop: it won't let you move up or down! This text sits on fixed lines within the document and can only be moved between them by changing its vertical alignment attribute. Select the entire line, choose Attributes, go to the character tab, and enter a small positive or negative value in the bottom left box (hit Enter to see the effect) until the line is in the right place. Tedious and confusing? You bet! Remember: PDF is an output and review format, not meant for heavy editing.
6. When you appended a page to the Acrobat Seminar document, it got placed at the bottom, not at its correct location within the sequence of pages. To move pages around, we use the Thumbnails pane (open it via the Thumbnails tab at left). This provides a quick overview of all pages in the document, and you can just drag a thumbnail around to change the page sequence. Drop the appended page higher up, where it belongs.
7. Deleting pages is simply done by deleting its thumbnail. To really remove any deleted pages from the file, use File > Save As... and make sure to have Optimize checked.
8. Thumbnails can also be used to add pages from one document to another. From the Handouts page for the seminar, open the Seminar Evaluation Form and drag its thumbnail into the current document (at the bottom). To do this easily, it is necessary to have both thumbnails panes visible. Use Window > Tile Vertically to achieve that. Another way of doing this is Document > Insert Pages, but with thumbnails you can more easily select exactly which pages to add.
9. Our captured pages have a lot of white margin that does not add value. Want to hide it? Nothing easier than that. Document > Crop Pages does the trick - it masks border areas as if we had cropped them off, but is totally reversible (it doesn't make files smaller either). In thumbnail view, select the pages you want to crop, then specify your margins. Notice the preview guides. If you cropped too much or too little, try again. You can also use the crop tool for the same effect by dragging out an area, then double-clicking to crop. Open the document Acrobat Seminar as PDF from the handouts page to see examples of this cropping in action (the pages explaining PDFwriter, Distiller, and PDFmaker).
10. That document also contains three article threads for quick reading of several pages by simply clicking with the hand tool. Let us define another article thread for the topic Why Use PDF?. With the article tool , drag out a box containing the first part of the article, then drag additional boxes over the following parts. When done, hit Enter and name the article.
11. Want to add another piece to an existing article? Click with the article tool on an existing article box to select it (can even be in the middle of the article). Notice the little plus-symbol at bottom right? Click it once, then scroll to the page containing the next part of the article and drag out a box - hit Enter to commit, Escape to cancel. Note that you must use simple scrolling to get to the other page, or you will get out of article-insertion mode. This method would be useful e.g. to insert a sample page demonstrating good uses of PDF as part of this article, without breaking the flow of the main document (similar to showing a webpage in the middle of a Powerpoint presentation).

Third-Party Comments

1. The PDF Comments Demo in the Handouts section has a few comments on it. Add some of your own comments to it, using various comment tools. Make sure you have set your name in the comment preferences!
2. Export Comments from the File menu. This creates an FDF file, a very small file containing only the comments that can easily be emailed. Email it to volk@uic.edu.
3. The Handouts section contains an FDF file with some more comments about this document. Import it to the PDF Comments Demo (File > Import). Check them in the Comments pane.
4. Note that this can only be done with the full Acrobat program, not with the free Reader. The $39 Acrobat Approval supports this, but at only $50 (acad. price) the full suite is the better buy.
5. Sample uses of this technique:
   • Group papers (internal review process of the group)
   • Emailing grading comments to student (small file!)
   • TA and instructor both grading/commenting on a paper
   • Students sending instructor their comments about a class handout (perhaps even taken down during a live class)

PDF forms

1. From the Handouts page, open the Seminar Evaluation Form. Let us pretend we just scanned this from paper and want to make it an interactive form for the web.
2. With the form tool , drag a rectangle over the box for Seminar Title. Make this field a text box, allowing multi-line input, with auto-sized text. Name the field semtitle and give it a description such as "Enter Seminar Title here". Specify a light grey background color and a dark text color of your choice, but not black, then set the appearance of this area to be embossed.
3. Make another box for the date. Note how all settings but the field name and description have been preserved, so you maintain a uniform look and feel. Name this field semdate, add a description, then on the Format tab choose a date format such as mm/dd/yy in which the date should be submitted.
4. Now let us add radio buttons for the first line of ratings. Those five fields need to bear the same name, as they refer to the same question, and we want users to give only one rating per question. Choose Circle as appearance (default for radio buttons) and add a description. On the Options tab, assign value 1 for the first button in the Disagree column.
5. To avoid redoing too many of these, copy the button, then paste it four times. You can now drag the four copies to the other columns, then double-click each of them to change the option value from 1 to 2-5.
6. We won't deal with more fields, but we need a submit button on the form. Near the bottom, drag a rectangle and choose button this time. Make it beveled and choose your colors. Under Options, set the appearance to text only, then type Submit Feedback as button label. You can also supply another label, e.g. Push here! for the mouseover state of the button. Finally, we need to tie this form to some CGI script that will process the form data. On the Actions tab, click Add for the MouseUp state, i.e. when the button is pushed and released. Choose the action Submit Form. Pick to submit the data as an HTML form (not FDF), and type in a URL for a form-processing script (those are a topic all by themselves, e.g. at UIC see http://www.accc.uic.edu/webpub/formmail/). You want to submit all fields and OK all dialogs. Save and optimize. Time to test the form - switch to the hand tool to do so.