With the Greatest of Ease: A Review of Adobe Acrobat 5.0

A Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file is created by Adobe Acrobat software. Adobe's most recent release of this software, Acrobat 5.0 ($249.00 full version, $99 upgrade) offers significant advantages for creating interactive documents that serve a wide range of purposes.

Originally, Adobe PDF was designed as a format to send documents that could be easily printed regardless of the recipient's operating system or software applications. Manufacturers were fast to adopt Acrobat as a means of making their user manuals and other documents available on websites. If you lost the repair manual for your Sony BVP 2800, you could download the Adobe PDF file and print it, retaining the exact look and feel as it appears on your desktop. You simply downloaded the free, Acrobat Reader software, installed in on your computer and then downloaded the Adobe PDF file from the Sony website.

So why not make your company brochure in Acrobat and send it to your potential customers? The process is really easy. If you are proficient in one of the leading page layout programs like Quark (it comes in both Windows and Mac versions now) or Pagemaker, the best way to make a PDF brochure is simply to direct your existing brochure to make a PDF version under the "File/Save As" command.

But if you don't know how to operate a page layout program, or don't have access to your original brochure layout files, here's the next best thing - making a brochure in Acrobat directly. It's possible, easy and fun. And added, interactive advantage await you, too!

All you'll need is a suitable computer, an average quality scanner and Adobe Acrobat software. Adobe Photoshop 6.0 is also helpful, but not necessary. Here's how.

First, Get Acrobat 5.0

Retailing at $US249.00, Adobe Acrobat 5.0 installs on your PC or MAC in minutes. Although Adobe includes a useful hardcopy "getting started" guide, there is no hardcopy user's manual, because the software installs - you guessed it - with an Adobe PDF file of the manual. I think it would be nice to have a full manual printed at the manufacturer's expense. The PDF help file however, is always available as an indexed document on your computer, so maybe I'm being old fashioned.

Want tutorials? Here you're in for a treat. They're available on your computer too, by accessing the, "Adobe Online" choice in the Help pulldown. In Adobe's online facility you will find useful tutorials, automatic updates and other useful tools for Acrobat and Adobe's other products (Premiere, After Effects, GoLive, Illustrator, LifeMotion, InDesign and Photoshop).

First Get the Text

Creating a PDF file from an existing wordprocessing file is very simple. In just a few minutes you can take the most elaborate document, with various type sizes, indentations, "run arounds" (places where text is indented to follow the shape of a graphic element), and colors and turn it into a PDF file that will appear in a client's email box, exactly as it does on your computer and printer.

Assuming you have access to the original wordprocessing text files of your brochure, simply open your favorite wordprocessor, load the appropriate file and go to Print. You will notice that in addition to your usual printer assortment, the installation of Acrobat has added a new option, "Acrobat Distiller."

Choosing Distiller and then clicking on, "Print," will open a menu that allows you to name a new file and create a PDF version of your document. Press, "OK," and in a few seconds your PDF file is created and stored wherever you indicated. Automatically, Acrobat opens and displays your new file for checking. One problem that might crop up here is if your text file includes fonts that are not resident on your computer, such as those created, "out-of-house" by a subcontractor. In such cases, Acrobat will ask you if you want to substitute other fonts or retrace your steps.

It's also important to note that with Acrobat 5.0, the progam installs something called "PDF Maker Macros" into your Microsoft Office 2000 applications like Word, Excel, Powerpoint. If you are creating an Adobe PDF file from one of these applications, you don't have to go through the print dialogue box to create an Adobe PDF file. Instead, you can use the small PDF button that you will find on your toolbar in the application and you can simply click that button to create your Adobe PDF file.

What About Photos?

In order to populate your brochure with colorful photographs and artwork, it is best to import each graphic element separately from the text. To do this, fire up your graphics acquisition software (I use Adobe Photoshop 6.0 employing the File/Import/TWAIN 32 command to access my Epson Perfection 2500 flatbed scanner.)

Start scanning the artwork from your brochure into files that are easy to remember, "FrontPage," "Page2PhotoGeorge," etc. If you have a lot of full color photos in your brochure, you will have to make a compromise between picture quality and the size of your final PDF file. Most clients like a file that is under 2 megabytes in size, but as clients acquire wider bandwidths, this limitation is expanding. I prefer to acquire my photos at 600 dpi and then reformat and resize them in Photoshop to achieve an ideal final PDF file size. More on this later.

Store your pictures in a subdirectory that is similar to your brochure's structure, so that it is easy to find them when working in Acrobat. When all your graphics are scanned, go into Acrobat.

The Acrobat Interface

Acrobat is almost intuitive enough to get started without documentation or a tutorial and you can certainly try to execute your project by clicking around. All of the buttons have popup names and their keyboard equivalent that appear if you park your mouse for a second or two.

You can also refer to the "getting started" guide which has all the buttons defined as well as the keyboard equivalents. The interactive PDF document, complete with index, and the ability to immediately access online web support - is also quite good as an ever-available tool. I found the PDF version particularly handy one day, while working on a long road trip, where I would not have taken a printed documentation along. When I needed at tip, there it was, a few keystrokes away.

Online, you can find useful tutorials on just about every aspect of Acrobat. While I miss the basic CD-based tutorial, which was offered in an earlier version of Acrobat, the online tutorials can be updated more frequently and address ongoing challenges from Adobe's technical support staff reports discovered during interaction with current users.

The Acrobat work screen is dominated by a full screen representation of the active page of your document. At the bottom of the display is a bar that shows the number of the active page, the current printable size of the page, and buttons for navigating through the pages. To the left is a tab row. Tabs offered are Bookmarks, Thumbnails, Comments and Signatures. Bookmarks are electronic page markers that you can place in large documents to help your readers find their way. Comments are like little yellow PostIts that can be placed anywhere on a document. When clicked, they open to reveal text that you have placed there. Tabbing the Comments, you can see a list of each comment you have added to your document by page number, author, date and type. Tabbing Signatures you can find each instance of a legally binding digital signature, which may be added to Adobe PDF files for contractual purposes.

Although Acrobat configures these default choices in the Tabs area, it's important to note that any item under the "Window" option on the top of your toolbar (ie. articles, bookmarks, comments, destinations, Fields, Info, Signatures, Tags, Thumbnails) can be made into a tab.

For example, if you go to Window>Tags, you can click, drag and drop the "Tags" file folder into the left-hand tab pane and it will become its own tab, ready for instant access.

The most useful tab is Thumbnails. Open this to see a vertical display of each of your pages, with the current page highlighted. If you want to quickly change the order of pages, just grab a thumbnail and slide it up or down to a new position, Acrobat does the rest. Same goes for deleting pages or for smaller pages (like graphics) and cutting and pasting them into larger pages.

Import a photo or graphic in any of the popular formats (.jpg, .gif, etc.) and the graphic appears as a page in the thumbnails column and as an active page. You can even import web pages from an existing website into Acrobat to incorporate in your document!

Across the top of the Acrobat interface is a row of tool icons. To grab an imported photo, for instance and embed it on a page, choose the Object Touch Up tool and right-click on the photo in the main display window, then choose, "Cut" or "Copy." Move to the text page into which you wish to place the photo and click, "Paste." The photo is added to the text page. Unfortunately, Acrobat has no way of resizing imported graphics once they are in Acrobat, so you may have to do some trial and error work here.

This is facilitated if you already have Adobe Photoshop 6.0 installed, which comes with Acrobat plug-ins. By simply selecting the TouchUp Object Tool from the tool bar in Acrobat, selecting a graphic, then right-clicking and choosing Edit Image, Photoshop will automatically open the image as a temp file. You can make changes to the temp file and after saving them, the updated graphic will be imported back into your Adobe PDF file! This is a very elegant feature that saves a lot of time, even though I would prefer a Acrobat tool that let you resize a photo within Acrobat.

Once you've added the graphic to the page, you may need to rework the text to fit the graphic. Although Acrobat will certainly support wordprocessor functions, the functions are only active on one line of text at a time. Consider the text editing tool in Acrobat to be a touch-up device only. Still, the touch up will allow you to change text, font, color, etc. with ease.

With your text and graphics entered and designed as you wish, you are now able to save out a PDF document that is emailable and will appear on your recipient's computer exactly as you have formatted it. In addition, your recipient will be able to print that document exactly as you intended.

But wait! There's more.

Now that you've composed your page as a printed piece, you can avail yourself of the vast interactive functions available in Acrobat. For instance, any part of any page may be made into a "link." A link on an Acrobat page makes your recipient's cursor change into a little pointing hand. When the viewer clicks on a link, any number of things may be made to occur. The link can take the viewer to another page, or start an audio file, or movie, initiate a JavaScript executable, load a new file, whatever. Creative employment of the link feature in Acrobat makes your emailed documents come to life - kind of like a "pushed" web page.

Once you're finished with your Acrobat document, you can also convert it into HTML pages - in other words, make it into a website. To do this, you first have to go to the Acrobat 5.0 section of the Adobe.com website and download a free plug-in called the "Save As XML Plug-in." After installing this plug-in, you can then take an existing Adobe PDF file, choose File>Save As and in the Save As dialogue box, choose HTML from the Save As Type menu. This will convert your Adobe PDF file into a suitable HTML equivalent.

Sizing Things Up

One problem you may encounter in Acrobat is that you get ambitious and create large PDF files that are cumbersome to email. For instance, many email servers have a limit (some are 10 megs, some 5 and many allow just 1 meg) on the size of email they will accept.

Since it isn't difficult to build a 10 meg PDF file, Adobe has routines built in to help you analyze the size of your file, reduce it if possible and reconfigure the result to target the finished file size. Of course, if you're creating an entire manual or book in Acrobat, you'll just have to settle for sending it by file transfer protocol (FTP) or by recordable media, like a CD, DVD or Iomega Zip disk.

Applications

PDF brochures, for your company or service are excellent ways to promote your capabilities in a way that makes the medium a message in itself. Acrobat includes tools to make forms in your document that allow your recipients to respond to you with detailed information. You can easily create a form, for instance, that allows your potential customer to enter vital statistics, even fill out a questionnaire specifying which of your products or specialties are most required. These forms can then be automatically emailed back to you, providing valuable feedback on your emailing.

While not specifically a video production product, Adobe Acrobat is an essential and valuable addition to the project studio producer's armamentarium and a easy one tool to master.

You can look at a samples that I have created for my company by entering http://www.avekta.com/porfolio/PDFs/ in your browser and downloading AvektaTransBroch.pdf. This is an interactive brochure featuring text in several languages, a report form, many links and some simple, but effective use of the Acrobat program. The really aggressive, interactive movie and sound stuff, I'll leave to you!