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Tuesday, October 30, 2012

Adobe Acrobat for Creative & Business - Editing Text


In the last post I looked at the OCR feature in Adobe Acrobat.  That feature is needed if the pdf is a flattened file, but if the pdf is not a flattened file you can actually select and edit text if you have the full version.

Once your pdf file is launched in Adobe Acrobat click on the Tools link to see possible features.
From the list click on Content to open that palette.



There are a lot of great features here, for editing text we are going to click Edit Document Text

Now click on the document, you can see a box outline the paragraph you just clicked in, and a blinking curser in the text. Just start typing where the curser is to add text.

To edit exiting text highlight the word you wish to change and type the new word.



So we have edited text in a pdf, and even added to it, but we did all those changes in existing paragraph blocks.  What if we need to add an entirely new paragraph?  Easy!

In the same Content palette, that we had found under Tools we can click on Add or Edit Text Box which will launch a text formatting menu.



Click in your document and start typing.



You will probably have to edit the font to make the text fit in with the rest of your document.  You can either set it before you start typing or highlight your text after you type.  Then use the Typewriter box to adjust desired font settings.

Finally just a reminder to save your document when you finish.  Rename it if you need to keep the old document, since saving these changes will copy over that.

I remember the days of choppy unpredictable pdf files.  I was happy to view them let alone edit.  Who would have thought pdfs would evolve to this!  Stay tuned for another Adobe Acrobat tutorial next week.

Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Standard Windows

Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Adobe Acrobat for Creative & Business – Built in OCR


A pdf could have been made from a layered or text file which will open in Acrobat and allow you to highlight text for copying or editing. Sometimes pdf files come from programs like Photohshop which flatten the text and don’t allow highlighting in Acrobat.

OCR stands for Optical Character Recognition.  There are tons of OCR programs that will read an image file and turn the text to editable letters, and Adobe Acrobat has added this to its available features.
I had someone send me a flattened pdf file which would not allow me to copy and paste text.  Of course I did not want to retype 35 pages so I thought how can I grab this text.
  •  First I opened the file in Adobe Acrobat
  • Open Tools on the right.
  •  I tried to use the text tool under Content, Edit Text & Objects but could not grab any text.
  •  Next I selected Recognize Text and clicked the first option I saw “In this file”
  •  The built in OCR ran through all the pages and converted the text to actual letters I could select.
  • I again went into Content, Edit Text & Objects and selected the text tool.
  • This time it let me select the text, which I was able to copy and paste into my presentation file.

That just saved me hours of typing (and hours of proofing because I type horribly).   So as I started working with this type for the most part it was very easy to highlight then copy and paste to my presentation but like any OCR sometimes the software has a hard time recognizing some of the type.
  • To refine the OCR conversion I went back into Recognize Text, and selected Find All Suspects under OCR Suspects. 

It went through my text and highlighted text the areas it could not distinguish.  I clicked Accept and Find which converted that word to text and moved on to the next.  Now with this extra step I was able to make even better selections to copy and paste actual characters of text.

It’s not perfect, like most OCR software, but what a great feature to have.  

Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Standard Windows

Tuesday, October 16, 2012

Adobe Acrobat for Creative & Business – Which version should I get?


At some point we all run into a pdf file whether it is a website attachment, a form from our doctors office or a creative file.  To open and view a pdf at some point you had to download Adobe Acrobat Reader.  This is the free download from Adobe that allows you to read a pdf file. The free version has some features you can print, crop and probably make some notes in the document. 

In addition to the free Acrobat Reader version you can purchase a full working version of Adobe Acrobat.  For just a couple hundred dollars you can get a lot of features, including the ability to make your own pdf files because you can’t create a pdf with the free version. 

There are now two different types of paid versions.  Acrobat Standard is best used for a single user, and Acrobat Pro is best used for working in a group. You can test drive with a free trial and purchasing is roughly $100 difference in price.

Some features for each:

Acrobat Reader (FREE)
Acrobat Standard
Acrobat Pro
Read PDF Files
x
x
x
Create PDF Files

x
x
Convert PDF to other formats

X (Word, Excel, HTML)
X (Word, Excel, HTML, Power Point)
Edit PDFs

x
X
Merge files into PDF

X (merge pdf files)
X (merge pdf & other formats)
Create PDF& web forms
x
x
X
Review PDF documents
x
x
X (allows file sharing)
Sign electronic PDF
x
x
X
Protect PDF files

x
X

Whether you get standard or pro one huge win to me is actually making a pdf because you can create a secure file.  That means you can password protect the document which will not allow anyone else to change it.  Keeping the integrity of your file, and all pdfs can be created to a fairly compact size that is easy to email.

This series is going to discuss some of the great features available in Adobe Acrobat that might really benefit your business workflow.  I have used several features like OCR and creating forms that I will share, and I will explore some features I haven’t tried and share that with you.  Should be fun!

Adobe Acrobat 8.0 Standard Windows