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Using Acrobat Reader
by By Nozer Dadachanji — November 2000 1960 PC Users Group reprint from Big Blue and Cousins http://www.bbc.org - February 22, 2001 at 14:24:27:
It may not have been a particularly observable occurrence, but over the last little while you may have noticed that many web sites are now offering documents for downloading and viewing as PDFs. PDF, which stands for Portable Document Format, has been around for some years, although Adobe, who I presume developed it, didn’t seem to make much headway in getting it to be generally accepted. That seems to have changed. Now it appears that PDF is the preferred method for exchanging and transmitting documents while keeping formatting and links intact.Big Blue & Cousins has (of course) been no laggard in recognizing this trend. Our newsletter has, for several months, been available at our website in this format. With the last couple of issues, we’ve gone a step further by creating the newsletter in a mixture of PageMaker and PDF files. We then create a single PDF for the whole issue, which is uploaded to our printer’s FTP site for final printing of the hard copy. We have thus eliminated virtually all manual paper handling until the final stage - labeling and mailing - and we’re working on automating the labeling part as well.
The Adobe Acrobat Reader, which is used to read PDF files, is free and available from a multitude of sites. Of course, the Acrobat program that is used to create PDFs can also read them. The reader is quite a versatile little beast and allows one to view documents with great facility. However, the various capabilities of the program are not intuitively obvious (perhaps it started out as a Mac program).
When you first start the program and load a file, the cursor will appear by default as a hand. It is likely that the document will be larger than the window in which its opens, so to view the hidden areas you can resize the document in a number of ways. The toolbar has three similar buttons towards the right that are shaped like a sheet of paper with a corner folded over. With these, you may view the document at actual size, fit the whole page in the view area or fit it to use the full available width.
Except for the second option, there may still be areas out of view. The automatic response is to go to the vertical scroll bar and try to move down the page. However, the scroll bar applies to the entire document, not just the page in view. So, if it is a long document with many pages, a small movement of the scroll thumb can move you through several pages. A pop-up indicator does show which page you are on, but if you are just looking around on one page, it is best to use the default hand tool. Just hold down the left mouse button and move the cursor. The document will slide around as though it was a sheet of paper being moved behind the view opening.
The up/down arrow keys on the keyboard will also move the document vertically. Pressing the enter key will move you progressively through the whole document. You can also set the document to display as a continuous strip (one page below the next) or with facing pages, as in a book. To set this, use the tool on the status bar to the right of the page dimensions.
To change pages, use the left/right pointing triangles on the toolbar or the left/right arrow keys on the keyboard. The triangle-with-bar icons take you to the first or last page. A specific page can be reached by editing the page number in the status bar at the bottom of the window and pressing enter. The status bar can also be used to adjust the magnification of the view. In addition, it displays the current page dimensions.
The left and right arrow keys on the toolbar behave like the Back and Forward buttons in most browsers, that is, they allow you to retrace your steps through the pages and views you’ve been through and back again.
The magnifying glass tool can be used to zoom in on a particular area of the page by drawing a marquee around it or by simply clicking on it. Hold down the control key and click to zoom out. The text/graphics selection tool allows you to select parts of the text, or one or more graphics, and copy them to the Windows clipboard. (Hold down the mouse button on the Text select tool, and additional tools will “fly out”). The binoculars tool is used to search for text in the document.
Some facilities are sometimes unavailable if the document creator has set security limitations. For example, copying text or printing the document may be disallowed. Click on the right pointing triangle at the top of the vertical scroll bar to see more about the document.
The last tool I’d like to point out is the navigation pane toggle to the left of the hand tool. Activate it to open an Explorer- like view that shows “bookmarks”, which are more appropriately called contents items, linked to specific points in the document (we use this in the PDF version of our newsletter). The “thumbnails” tab that also appears, shows a thumb-nail-sized view of each page in the document, so you can jump to a particular page if you recognize its thumbnail. Note however, that the document must have been created with this information for it to appear to the reader. There are a number of other techniques that I find useful, but this lot should help you get more out of the reader. Get Adobe Acrobat Reader at Adobe http://www.adobe.com
Copyright © 1997 - 2000 Big Blue and Cousins: The Greater Victoria Personal Computer Users’ Association
[Ed Note: The Orange Bytes are also produced with PageMaker and uploaded to you website www.noccc.org in both HTML and PDF format.]
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