Oct
28
2008
Here’s a tip for owners of Creative Suite Premium 3.3, the intermediate release that included Acrobat 9: you’re eligible for a discount! Because you’ve already paid for Acrobat 9, which is also included in Creative Suite 4 Design Premium (could they make the name just a little longer?), you don’t have to pay for it again.
Owners of plain old CS3 Premium (the one with Acrobat 8 Pro) pay $599 to upgrade to CS4 Premium. But CS3.3 owners can upgrade to CS4 Premium for $440 ($599 minus the $159 you paid for the CS3.3 upgrade).
The catch? You have to call Adobe customer service to get this special pricing. Here’s the number: 1-800-585-0774. The Adobe customer service line is open 5am-7pm Pacific time, Monday-Friday, and 6am-6pm on Saturday.
Oct
12
2008
To speed up Preflight checks and fixups in Acrobat, you can create a Droplet out of any profile. Droplets can also be created from the nifty new Single Fixups and Single Checks in Acrobat 9 Pro. The Droplet icon looks like this:
A Droplet is a small application that contains preflight instructions, and allows you to batch process multiple PDFs that you wish to Preflight. Choose a profile (or create a new one), then, in the Preflight dialog, choose the Options pull-down menu and select Create Preflight Droplet. You’re given options for how the Droplet will check and process files (see below): I like to sort the PDFs into Good and Evil folders, depending on whether they pass or fail preflight. (You can name your folders anything you like.)
To run a Droplet, drag a PDF (or multiple PDFs) on top of the Droplet icon, wherever you’ve saved it. Acrobat wakes up, and processes the PDFs according to the preflight instructions contained in the Droplet.
There was one limitation in Acrobat up through Acrobat 8: While you could process an entire folder of PDFs by selecting all the PDFs and dragging them onto the Droplet, you couldn’t drag the folder itself onto the Droplet. It couldn’t see into the folder.
I was tickled to hear that the new Acrobat 9 Pro is supposed to allow us to drag a folder full o’PDFs on a Droplet for processing . . . but it doesn’t work 
If you attempt to drag a folder full of PDFs onto the Droplet, you’ll receive an error — Acrobat won’t dig into the folder and reacts as if it’s an unsupported file type. Big deal — you can just select the PDFs themselves and drag them over the Droplet, as you’ve done with previous versions. But it’s supposed to work, and has been logged as a bug, so let’s hope for a fix, so we can save those few seconds (as if any of us are that efficient!).
