How to insert a link to a URL into a pdf

March 29th, 2011 Comments Off

Insert Link Into PDFs Using the Create Link Tool

Choose Tools from the top menu.
Choose Advanced Editing/Link Tool. The cursor becomes a crosshair. Drag over the text to convert it to a hyperlink.
Select the type of link by clicking the radio button in front of the requested option in the Create Link dialog box. Click OK.
Save the PDF file. The link is now inserted into the document.

Insert Link Into PDFs Using the Select or Snapshot Tool

Choose Tools from the top menu, and then click Select & Zoom.
Drag over the text to convert to a hyperlink.
Right-click on the selected text, and select Create Link from the context menu. A hyperlink will be created on the highlighted text, and the Create Link dialog box will open.
Type the URL to the desired link into the input box.
Type a description for the link. This description will be the text that is displayed in the document. Clicking this link activates the link and will open a browser or application and display the destination URL

Are you a plaintiff’s attorney? Do you handle class action suits?

March 25th, 2011 Comments Off

Make sure your staff knows how to create Acrobat forms to send to all class action clients so that the data can be submitted back to you in a format that can be sorted and filtered and imported into Excel or Access for reporting. Do not plod through pages of individual forms or hire people to enter the data. The 21st century needs 21st century tools. Call us today if you need help with forms.

More on Acrobat.com

February 28th, 2011 Comments Off

Recently I tried to share an MSAccess database file on Acrobat.com. It was over 80 mg so my email server wouldn’t accept it. My Microsoft Skydrive won’t take a file over 50 mg. I was so sure Acrobat.com was going to be my answer. Wrong! After waiting for about 10 minutes while it acted like it was uploading, it came back and said it didn’t accept Access files. Why couldn’t it figure this out in the first 30 seconds? Really annoying. Also, with the free Acrobat.com account, you cannot create a pdf from more than one file. The button is sitting there on the screen, but when you try to use it you are prompted to upgrade to the paying version. I know I know…they have to market you somewhere. I ended up using DropBox. It uploaded quickly without a single complaint.

Why upgrade to Acrobat X (10)?

February 22nd, 2011 Comments Off

There are a lot of good reasons to use the latest version, but the main one for me is that it is the only version that works with MS Office 2010. The other compelling reasons would be ease of use, cleaner screen and faster performance.

Adobe’s feature comparison between versions 7, 8, 9 and 10

Acrobat X reviews:

eWeek review: lists 10 reasons in a slide show, some of which are part of Acrobat 9; most compelling slide for me was that the file size could be smaller without losing quality

Notebook review: slick interface, faster performance, improved interface with Word and Excel

Creative Pro review: Actions and the Action Wizard, improved customization for PDF Portfolios, simplified user interface that promotes efficiency.

Not an Acrobat issue, but I couldn’t resist posting this here

February 10th, 2011 Comments Off

The postman always knocks…how many times?

This is one of the best tech things that has happened to me in a long time. I was in a non-technical law partner’s office. He wanted an hour of personal tutoring on his computer. I looked at his Inbox and commented on his 20,000 emails, 1200 of them unread. He got a bit excited and asked me how I knew these numbers. I pointed to them on the screen. He then told me he could not understand how there could be 1200 unread emails. He came in every morning and printed out that day’s emails. He didn’t look at his computer again until the next morning when he printed out THAT day’s emails. That’s right…giggle…he thought his electronic mail only came once a day, just like his snail mail. He missed all email that arrived after he printed each day. He had never noticed that some emails were bold and some were not. He had never noticed the Unread with the ever growing number after it. I almost reached for my cell to text everyone I knew right in front of him, but held myself back until I had time to post it to the entire internet.

Batch operations

January 5th, 2011 Comments Off

Recently I was in a firm where a partner told me he had had a case where his client produced 30 gigs of discovery documents. Most of them were pdfs which were not searchable. He manually went through all of these documents. Many of them were duplicates…or one word changed from one doc to the next.

How would I have handled this? I would have created a batch operation which ran the optical character recognition feature in Acrobat on an entire folder of pdfs and put the new pdfs in a different folder. Then I would have run the full Acrobat search on the new folder to find the words or phrases for which he was looking. I would have created a pdf portfolio of all the documents (including other file formats than pdfs, such as Word, Excel, TIFF, JPG) and added fields to describe the individual documents. Duplicates would have been put in subfolders within the pdf. All documents would then be in one file, with descriptive names and fields noting whether requested search terms were found in that particular document.

If you have a large project which appears to need massive manual work, call us first. If you think there should be a better way to do something, there probably is a better way and we probably know what it is!

Spell check

November 19th, 2010 Comments Off

Acrobat has a spell checker for comments and form fields. Choose View/Toolbars and select the Edit toolbar. It does not work in the body of the pdf, gosh darn it.

Display pdf in Browser window or have it launch Adobe Acrobat

November 12th, 2010 Comments Off

Ever wonder why sometimes, PDF documents launch right in your browser window, and other times they launch Adobe Acrobat? This behavior is controlled by a simple setting in Acrobat preferences.

In Acrobat, click the Edit menu and choose Preferences.
Under Internet, choose Display PDF in browser if you want your PDF documents to launch in the browser.
Un-check this option if you want your PDF to launch Acrobat instead.

Bates Numbering with Acrobat

November 5th, 2010 Comments Off

Acrobat handles this task beautifully. The Bates Numbers are placed in a special header in Acrobat.

Copy all the documents to be Bates Numbered in a folder all by themselves.
Select Advanced/Document Processing/Bates Numbering/Add
Select all the files in the folder
The dialog box will populate with your file choices. Arrange them using the buttons on the left.
Click Next
Click inside the header or footer box where you wish the Bates Number to appear and click Insert Bates Number
The following dialog box pops up:

Bates Numbering

Experiment with the prefix and suffix to get the information required for your project.

8) If more documents need to be added to this process later, follow the above steps and change the start number on the above dialog box to the next number from your previous batch.

What to do when your pdf is too large to be accepted by the courts?

October 25th, 2010 Comments Off

In Acrobat 9 there is a Split Document feature (Document/Split Document) which has three splitting options:

Number Of Pages: Specify the maximum number of pages for each document in the split.
File Size: Specify the maximum file size for each document in the split.
Top-level Bookmarks: If the document includes bookmarks, creates one document for every top-level bookmark.

In practice, it seldom works to let Acrobat decide where to split the document. Usually the desired split is at the end of a section, before a major heading, not at some random page number or megabyte number.

RECOMMENDED METHOD: It is often simpler to use the Extract Pages feature (Document/Extract Pages). Figure out what pages should be in each pdf and then Extract from and to the desired pages to create new pdfs of the desired size.

There are also optimization and size reduction options in Acrobat:

Document/Reduce File Size
Document/Optimize Scanned PDF
Advanced/PFD Optimizer

Again, in practice, these features seldom shrink a legal pdf to the desired size. They work well if the pdf consists of many images which can be optimized to smaller sizes. However, legal documents are usually text based, and this does not work well on a text-based document. There just isn’t enough shrinkable stuff in a text based pdf.

Embedded fonts take up a lot of space in a pdf, but if you want to guarantee the look of the pdf, you really have to embed the fonts.

Using Acrobat to copy a protected Word form with a lost password

October 23rd, 2010 Comments Off

A few days ago a client had a password protected Word form for which the password had been forgotten. They were not able to edit the form or even copy the text in it due to Word’s protection feature. What to do?

I turned the form into a pdf. At this point we had a couple of choices: 1) Use Acrobat’s fabulous form features and make it a pdf form, or 2) turn the pdf back into a Word document. The client chose to keep the form in Word, so I exported the pdf to Word. The form fields were no longer valid at this point, though, so they had to be re-entered. However, all of the text of the form was now available for edit.

We then held a workshop on how to create forms in Word, add form fill-in fields, checkboxes and option buttons and then protect the form with and without a password.

Edit text in a pdf in its original font!

October 20th, 2010 Comments Off

Tools/Advanced Editing/Touchup Text Tool. Click in a pdf text area that has been OCR’d and start to type with this tool. Text can be added or deleted in the exact font as the pdf as long as that font exists on the computer doing the adding. PDFs are no longer uneditable. It is important that people understand this.

Even the Typewriter tool is available in a multitude of fonts in Acrobat 9. In Acrobat 8 the Typewriter tool only types in courier. The Touchup Text tool works in both versions.

Sample of a pdf presentation

July 24th, 2010 Comments Off

Click on this link to see a pdf presentation I created with eight sample cover designs for The Story of Your Life, Writing a Spiritual Autobiography, by Dan Wakefield. Notice that I can have transitions and can choose to have the pdf open in Full Screen Presentation mode or in a pdf mode with the pages in the navigation pane on the left.

Which cover design would you have chosen?

The Story of Your Life – Eight Cover Designs

Slide show presentation in a pdf

June 1st, 2010 Comments Off

Have you ever wanted to send a bunch of photographs in one email as a slide show
that will work on anyone’s computer? Try creating a pdf slideshow presentation:

Organize desired photos by giving each image a descriptive name and
placing them all in one folder with no other files in the folder.
From Acrobat, choose File/Create PDF/From Multiple Files.
Click on Add Files, browse to your images and select them (Ctrl-A selects all
the files within the folder or choose to Add Folder and add the entire folder in one swoop).
Click the radio button at the bottom of the screen that says Small File Size
so the end file will be small enough to email easily.
Choose to merge the files into a single pdf; click Create; click Save; name your file.
Change the document opening options: File/Properties/Initial View Tab to the following:

Hide whatever you wish to hide under the User Interface Options. Save and close your PDF.

Open it again to try it out. Click to move from slide to slide.

Now email it to your friends!

Climb the Clouds

May 11th, 2010 Comments Off

Additional information pertaining to my last post about working in the Cloud with Acrobat.com:

Acrobat.com is using its own proprietary software for word processing, spreadsheets, presentations and databases. It is a great way for a group of people to work together on the same project without anyone having to buy software. Adobe’s online software allows you to work on the exact same document at the exact same time as others; each individual can see what the others are doing. This would be a fabulous solution for a small company that didn’t want to spend money on offices or software. All employees could work from home and still work together. Many community projects would benefit from this service, too. I don’t know if the simultaneous editing works with the rest of the Adobe Creative Suite, though. I will test it out and report. It would be great to work in PhotoShop or InDesign or Illustrator simultaneously with someone.

If the end result must be sent to a client in Word format, the proprietary software won’t work. If the end result can be a pdf, this will work well. I don’t see law firms doing this. They have way too much invested in the Microsoft Office suite of products. I wonder how well Acrobat’s word processor handles a table of authorities and a table of contents on 28-line pleading paper with an embedded logo. Does it link with a macro package or your Outlook Contacts? I shall report back when I have tested this.

It would still be a productive product for groups within a larger organization to work on specific projects…web content, pdf projects, marketing materials, newsletters all come to mind. And Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PowerPoint presentations etc. can still be stored in the workspaces. They just cannot be accessed simultaneously.

I think it’s time to Climb the Clouds (Sly and the Family Stone).

Collaborating Online with Acrobat.com

May 4th, 2010 34 Comments

There are many services for storing and sharing your documents in cyberspace…on the cloud. The advantages for me are that my files are available to me anywhere in the world where I have internet access. If you steal my laptop, you didn’t get my data. The disadvantages are similar to the advantages: I always have to have internet access. However, I also don’t worry about backing up when I use an online storage service and I have easy methods for collaborating with others. I will discuss online storage and collaboration services on the GraceTechGroup.com blog and will link to it here soon. This is an incredible opportunity for small firms to move into the cloud, utilize the most current technology and lower their technical costs.

Collaborating with Acrobat.com

Using online Workspaces on Acrobat.com, you can easily share and collaborate on a set of documents with individuals or teams outside of your organization. As the Owner, you have complete Workspace sharing control. You decide who has what level of access to each project’s documents.

Workspaces virtually eliminate the need to e-mail files between team members. Users access an online Workspace to review and collaborate on documents.

Share files—especially large ones—online, without e-mail file size limitations
No special file sharing software or IT involvement necessary

Collaborate with several people at once:

Easily set up online Workspaces to enable people on distributed teams to collaborate on documents.

Across time zones and firewalls.
No version control issues.

It will cost, however, if you need to meet with more than 3 people at a time and/or need more than 1 workspace:

Subscriptions	Free	Acrobat.com Premium Basic	Acrobat.com Premium Plus
Online Workspaces	1	Up to 20	Unlimited
Convert to PDF	5 PDF files total	Unlimited PDF files	Unlimited PDF files
Downloads per document	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Web conference capacity	3 people	5 people	20 people
Online word processing	Included	Included	Included
Technical support ¹	Moderated forums only	Premium one-on-one phone/chat	Premium one-on-one phone/chat
Price (U.S. dollars)	Free	$14.99 monthly $149 annual	$39 monthly $390 annual

The above was taken directly from the Adobe website.

Microsoft’s OfficeLive has 5 gigs of free workspaces and it allows you to collaborate in MS Office software…the products most businesses already use. More on this later at GraceTechGroup.com.

Adobe Acrobat

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