Duff Johnson’s PDF Perspective

Google Book Search, the extension of things Google into the world of the printed word, has taken a new step, one much applauded by denizens of the PDF community.

As many readers will know, Google has been busy scanning out of print books, and it’s not a low-volume operation.  Google has now decided to make them freely available, cover to cover, as downloadable PDF files, no charge.

In a forthcoming Post, I’ll take a look at the service, and report on the quality of Google’s offering.  Of course, it’s hard to argue with free… but I’ll try!

To give you an idea of the way I feel about Reader Extensions…

I was visiting a client this week. One of their graphic designers raises Ball Pythons, and (on request) brought one into the office during my visit. We got kind of cozy.

Anyhow… the POINT I’m trying to make is that the Extended Rights Manifesto has been updated with Article 10. To save you a click, here it is:

Article 10

Separate “form” rights from “save” rights. PDF forms are often used for document applications rather than as forms per se, as in CD-ROM interfaces, electronic brochures, and so on. These applications may require Extended Rights to import FDFs (for example), but do not require the ability to save a form. For these purposes, Acrobat Professional should be able to bestow form rights on a PDF without limitation or reservation. With these “pdf as application” rights applied, the default form-related warnings to the user when opening or closing the PDF would not occur.

In this way, it would become very easy to develop “application” PDFs using the full suite of forms functionality without interfering with a “real” forms oriented business-model for Extended Rights.

I’m often asked “Hey, when is the PDF/UA Committee going to tell us what exactly constitutes accessible PDF is and how we get there?” I don’t have an answer for this question, yet. I can tell you that we are working on timelines now - stay tuned.

In the interim, I’d like to offer, with the kind permission of the author, Adobe Systems’ Greg Pisocky, his guide to Creating Accessible PDFs using Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional, now hosted on the Document Solutions, Inc. website. (Full Disclosure)

IMHO, Adobe themselves should host this document at their Accessibility Resource Center, because it’s the best Adobe publication on the subject to-date. Until they do, however, we’ll just try to help out a little.

As noted by my esteemed fellow Blogger and AUC Editor Kurt Foss, AcrobatUsers.com has now made it easier to learn how to get things done with Acrobat by posting the Acrobat Help file online.

Now, why do they need to post it online, you might ask?  Isn’t the Acrobat Help file available right there in the Acrobat Help menu?

Indeed it is.  However, note that the clever little “mini PDF browser” invoked from the Help menu doesn’t allow one to know the page-number one is looking at.  This can make it sometimes quite difficult to quickly and effectively refer people to the correct section of the manual to assist in clarifying a point. 

To illustrate; two different ways to refer to the same location in the Help file:

1. Acrobat Help, via the Help Menu:  “Go to the ‘Converting Adobe PDF documents to other file formats’ section, try a text-search to find it.”
2. Acrobat Help, as referenced via page number (hyperlinked or no):  “Page 176″

Which would you prefer? One way to know which page-number you are looking at in the manual is to track down or even provide links to the file itself (ACROHELP.PDF) on Windows machines, usually found at C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Help\ENU\.  But this advice is bad - for it encourages users to poke around in the program files area… not a good idea.

Making the Help file available online thus provides a straightforward way to address a variety of training and reference issues.  AcrobatUsers.com currently makes the Manual is currently available as a Zip file.

The next move (and it would be a good one), would be to deploy each page and/or topic of the manual as a separate file (PDF or HTML), with a durable URL. This would allow any user to easily create a hyperlink direct to Adobe’s documentation to illustrate a training or reference point, or easily incorporate it within their own documentation.

Now, Adobe shouldn’t encourage anyone to actually print the Acrobat Pro 7.0 manual… quite a few of the pages are over 20 inches in length, with no page-break - injurious to their appearance when printed, even under the best of circumstances.

Ironically, the “Print Adobe PDF Documents” page (p. 642) is over 41 inches long. (!)

There are loads of nifty features scattered throughout the electronic document tool-chest that is Adobe Acrobat.

Even though I don’t have much occasion to use it, one of my favorite such gems is the Measuring Tool. It’s come in handy on several occasions for the very simple reason that I can quickly and easily measure any map, drawing or diagram, no matter the format.  Just convert to PDF, establish the scale, and trace.  That’s it.

Maybe you are planning a hike, or buying a condo.  Perhaps you are machining a part, or sketching layouts for a floor-plan.  In any of these tasks (and plenty others), you might need to quickly and effectively measure objects and distances as represented in a document. Acrobat can do that!

The Measuring Tools may be found under the Tools menu in Acrobat Standard or Professional.  Choose from Distance, Perimeter or Area measurement.

Simply enter the scale ratio into the Measure dialog. Select the correct units of measurement and start tracing the object of interest to generate perimeter and area numbers.

On vector graphics, the tool can “snap” to various points in the artwork itself for utterly precise measurements automagically.  On raster (bitmap) images such as the map example used here, simply trace right over the area of interest.

When a measurement is complete, the Tool can leave a highlighted annotation on the page displaying the measurement and any other notes you’d like to include.  Markup lots of objects, and the tool will export the values to Excel.

Of course, this tool doesn’t come close to the sophisticated measuring systems available in CAD software. For the vast majority of us, however, it doesn’t need to, and we’d never pay that money and go through the brain-damage anyhow.  If you can print it or scan it, you can measure it pretty darn well with Acrobat.  Some people would pay a lot for this feature alone.

And that’s just one of the toolkits in the Acrobat workshop!  More later.