Wow, I haven't made a post in ages. Who ever decided to hold the last week of our school term until after the holidays deserves to be flogged with a candy cane.
Acrobat, Adobe's Misunderstood Child
As mentioned above, Robert and I attend a new media program at BCIT. Our broad curiculum has not disappointed us so far in terms of comprehensiveness. One application that has been regretably overlooked is Adobe Acrobat Pro.
We all have this program loaded on our G4 laptops but have received no instruction until recently, in a Director class no less.
Here are a couple tips from that eye-opening class.
Have PDFs, Have a Bookshelf
No doubt, PDF is familiar to all those reading as a great way to proof documents with clients. Seamless support is built into Illustrator and Photoshop, so why bother with Acrobat Pro? The benefits have been known to our bretheren in traditional business for a while, but what about designers and programmers?
At RCS we have plenty of reference books and many are digital. The Bookshelf feature in Acrobat Pro will help you keep all of these organized.
Firstly, collect all your PDF resources for one topic in a single folder. Let's say it's Director.
In Acrobat, choose File > My Bookshelf. If you purchase eBooks in PDf form, this may be familiar to you.
Choose Add File from the icon on the top left of the My Bookshelf window. From here, navigate to the folder you previously created. Select the documents you wish to include and click Add.
Remember that software such as Director or Photoshop ship with PDF documentation that you may wish to include. For people on the go, or with limited shelf space, this is a handy way to get at your manuals.
Next, open the drop down list that currently reads All, three icons in from the left at the top of the My Bookshelf pane.
You'll want to add a category for Director, and erase Romance if your reading taste is anything like mine.
The next step is not as convenient as it should be. You have to select each document individually and select one of two categories from the lists at the bottom of the pane. Adobe, please include a batch select feature next release! The ability to have two categories for your docs is a nice touch, mind you.
At this point, you can easily toggle between the categories you want to see, excluding those that are not relevant.
Indices for Dummies, or Indexes for the Rest of Us
The above feature is not too impressive for anyone with a respectable filing structure. This next one to speed up your searches will truly be helpful. It's poorly documented but easily implemented after you've done it once.
Now that you've collected your PDFs in their appropriate folders, go to Advanced > Catalog and click New Index.
Give your index an appropriate title such as Director or Authoring.
Next to Include these directories choose Add.
Navigate to the folder where you stored your Director PDFs. Select just the folder and hit Choose (someone should label these things better).
Hit Build at the bottom of the following window and let Acrobat do its thing.
Acrobat will ask you where you want to save the index file. You can save the index in the category folder or, to keep tidy, you can build a new folder for all your indices.
In minutes, you have yourself a folder worth of PDFs cross indexed for key words, vastly speeding up searches. Best of all, your searches can be made across multiple PDFs by selecting Advanced Search Options in the Search sidebar. It's like having a free, live-in librarian at your beck-and-call. Mmmm, sexy. Er, this makes finding how to control MIAWs in Director MX 2004 a lot more convenient.
Now, if we could only get Word to stop hanging when we try to build a PDF (there's a request for you, MS).