Claudia McCue

The forms auto-recognition feature in Acrobat X Pro is powerful and fast — it creates form fields based on elements in the PDF (such as lines, boxes, circles, etc.), and names them according to nearby text. While you often have to tweak the results  — for example, creating fields it missed, renaming fields with paragraph-long names — it can be a timesaver. So why wouldn’t you always use it?

Recently, I worked on a large project with lots of numbered fields, and that experience sort of sharpened my thinking about auto vs. manual. Because I needed short, concise field names on pages with tons of neighboring text, I decided that renaming would take as long as creating from scratch, with less chance of error. On pages like the one shown above, I could’ve created all 40 fields almost instantaneously by letting Acrobat auto-recognize them, but I elected to create them by using the Place Multiple Fields feature.

That probably sounds like the long way around, but there was a method to my madness. I’ve created two videos to explain.

In Part I, I show how I created the fields using the Place Multiple Fields feature.

In Part II, I show how Acrobat’s auto-recognition feature would’ve handled it. Yes, it’s much faster, and no, I didn’t do it the “long way around” for billing purposes
At the end of Part II, I explain how important the field naming conventions are, and why my method allows me to take advantage of that, whereas Acrobat’s approach messes that up.

Oh, and just so you know, creating this 40+-page interactive form is really fun — I love the mechanics of creating and refining forms (how twisted is that?)

If you’re a longtime user of Adobe products, you’re probably accustomed to using Command-Spacebar (PC: Control-Spacebar) to zoom in. It works in Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and other apps.

But it seems (initially) to be broken in Acrobat X. Since you’re already traumatized by the radically-changed interface in Acrobat X, you may just assume that the old zoom shortcut is broken. You press Command+Spacebar, and nothing happens. You just figure, well, it was fun while it lasted.

All is not lost, however; you just have to use a bit of finesse. It’s a one-two punch: press and hold the Spacebar first, then — a half-second later — press and hold the Command or Control key. Voilá (which is French for “Zoom tool”), you can now click and zoom. It’s still the same combination of keys; you just have to press them in order (then hold) rather than simultaneously.

And no, I don’t know why. It’s one of those Great Mysteries.

If you haven’t already, download the 10.1 update for Acrobat X on the Mac. Now you can use the TouchUp Object tool to edit images and vector content. Have no idea why this was broken when Acrobat X shipped (see my earlier post here). But it’s all better now. You may commence to fixing all those problem PDFs your clients are sending you.

UPDATE: It’s finally been fixed! Download the 10.1 update and commence to TouchingUp.

Another reason to not uninstall your old software…

The Edit Object function (formerly TouchUp Object tool) is broken in the initial release of Acrobat X on the Mac. When you select an image or vector object, then right-click and choose Edit Object or Edit Image, it displays an error alert indicating that it can’t start the editing application.

No matter how hard you try to convince it to use Photoshop or Illustrator, it fails. Adobe is aware of the problem, but no date has been mentioned for a patch. Until this is fixed, you’ll have to use a previous version of Acrobat to do your repair work (if the original application file isn’t available), or use a PDF-editing application such as Enfocus PitStop.

Lucky Windows users — this doesn’t affect you. You can TouchUp to your little hearts’ content.

Adobe Systems has released the tenth version of the venerable Acrobat: Acrobat X (pronounced “ten,” not “ex”). Be prepared for culture shock: the interface is completely revamped. Not the “we moved some menu items around to keep you on your toes” you’ve seen in previous versions, but an utterly different environment. Like the “re-imagining” of recent Hollywood sequels, this one bears little resemblance to its ancestors.

As I explore more deeply, I’ll post more. But, for now, here’s how to find the full-fledged User Guide. From the Help menu, choose “Adobe Acrobat X Pro Help.” The Adobe Community Help application launches (as of CS5, the Help files appear in the Help application, not in your Web browser). Look for the PDF icon in the upper right corner of the interface, and click on “View Help PDF.” Once the PDF opens within the Help app, click the little floppy “save” icon to save the PDF to your hard drive.

Click the highlighted link to load the User Guide PDF, then save the file to your hard drive.

It was another one of those thoroughly snakebit jobs that go wrong at every step, but at its core is a mystery concerning how QuarkXPress treats an overprinting grayscale image in an exported PDF. “Regular” overprinting objects, such as text or boxes, display and print predictably. But grayscale images are handled differently, and this results in a misleading display in Acrobat, which leads to a surprise on press. And, as you know, “surprise” is not a good word in printing.

Here’s the timeline: Continue Reading »

If you’re a print service provider who’s starting to receive CS4 files for output, you might appreciate the latest revision of the venerable Printing Guide. It’s now available here.

The PDF is fully bookmarked; open the Bookmarks panel (View>Navigation Panels>Bookmarks) to reveal the extensive list of hyperlinked topics. Additionally, the Table of Contents is hyperlinked to internal content, so it’s easy to find your way around.

Designers will find lots of useful content, too. You can select a low-res or high-res version of the 139-page guide, and you’ll also find the CS3 version of the printing guide on the same page. Both offer insights into print-specific features in the Suite applications, and provide cautions and workarounds for each application.

I’m proud to say that I’m responsible for both the CS3 and CS4 revisions, starting with the CS2 version and building on its content. Consequently, some of the content is legacy, some was contributed by other revisers during the early CS3 phase, but the final versions of both are my doing. It was a labor of love, and I’m proud of the finished pieces. I hope you find the guides a valuable resource.

Given recent upheaval at Adobe (600 layoffs yesterday, including some very dear friends), I don’t know if there will be more versions of this resource. If Adobe doesn’t spearhead an update for future CS versions (assuming there will be future CS versions, and I can’t imagine there won’t be), I’ll do it myself.

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.

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!).

Does your printer ask you to submit PDFs as job files, or do they ask you to send application files (page layout, plus all the necessary fonts and artwork)? Maybe we’re just slow here on the East Coast (or, more likely, justifiably paranoid), but all the printers I know ask for application files. Or, if they encourage clients to submit PDFs, they ask for the application files as a backup. (If you’ve ever tried to edit text in a PDF, you know why.)

Given the difficulty of editing PDFs (even with the big guns of PitStop), I think this is understandable. It goes beyond fixing a comma: sometimes extensive changes are necessary to make a job print predictably. For example: a solid black back cover on a brochure, if built and printed as 100K on an offset press, will be anemic and blotchy (toner-based digital presses have a more robust black). Consequently, a large solid black area is usually converted to a rich black for stronger coverage. Unless you anticipate this when building your page layout, the printer needs to be able to modify the content so the job prints to your satisfaction. Not much fun to attempt fixing this in a PDF. Continue Reading »