Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

If you’ve spent any reasonable amount of time in the online world of Acrobat–forums, discussion lists, blogs and so on–you’ve undoubtedly run across your share of the always opinionated, often humorous and sometimes factual outbursts of non-believers. That’s certainly not meant to suggest that some of the tirades are not justified, carefully reasoned and/or thoughtfully explained. But a lot of the off-the-cuff posturing and fault finding can be dismissed as little more than techno tantrums, based on either a misunderstanding or a lack of understanding.

So when I stumbled upon a recent blog post that proclaims in its heading to be a “PDF Rant,” I braced for more of the latter. It actually proved to be the former.

In his San Bei Ji blog, moonlighting web designer and developer Joe Lewis sounds off, then offers a series of suggestions to address the problem as he perceives it. He begins with a rant-like statement of the issue:

“PDF is a poorly-understood medium for most developers. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that 98% (not scientific - you get the picture) of the PDF creators out there have any idea of what is going on underneath the hood when they produce a PDF. I’m talking basic information, like image compression, readability, usability, who is reading this, etc. Typically when doing usability studies for web sites, the process stops abruptly when the PDF is encountered. The user usually backs up a step, and the usability professional shrugs and says ‘let’s move on.’ Never mind the issues with optimizing vector data, embedding fonts, and so on. Typically, people pump out their 6 MB files without a thought. ‘That’s OK - they’ll download it and print it.’ Yeah right - did you test that theory? I thought not.”

Lewis then calmly proceeds to tick off eight detailed “recommendations for the next generation of usable, web-ready PDF design.”

We could use more thoughtful ranting like this that outlines a legitimate issue, then offers solutions. Got a rant of your own? Let us know!

It’s a little hard to believe, but a year has flown by since we opened the virtual doors to AcrobatUsers.com one year–or some 10,000 registered members–ago today. On the website, we’ve outlined the site’s evolution and outlined a few plans for new and enhanced, interactive features in Year Two.

“Our customers are our most important asset at Adobe,” said Tom Hale, senior vice president of Knowledge Workers Solutions at Adobe Systems, “and we’re dedicated to supporting a strong user community around the Acrobat family.”

If you’d like to share ideas and suggestions for ways we can provide that kind of support–and/or ways you’d like to contribute to the community–please let us know!

Happy Anniversary!

One reason for continuing to visit AcrobatUsers.com is the growing knowledgebase of information about the latest Acrobat product releases, an information stash that includes the most recently added “Ask an expert” feature where select gurus answer user-submitted questions.

If you want help with Acrobat 8 or Adobe Reader 8, of course, a good place to start is — to state the obvious — the Help documentation from Adobe Systems. When a program is launched, the browser-based content appears under, of all places, the Help menu. If you select the Complete Help option, the Adobe Help Viewer opens, making it easy to browse topical sections or to search the detailed documentation. The How To option provides an overview of the most common tasks.

With previous versions, when you installed Acrobat, one of the files included was a PDF version of Help, suitable for printing. However, many people never realized they had the PDF readily available — you had to know where to look to find it. For that reason, we posted the Acrobat 7 Help file in PDF for download.

If you’ve already installed Acrobat 8, there’s no need to go searching for the Help file in PDF. For whatever reason, as my colleague Duff Johnson has previously pointed out in his PDF Perspective blog, it’s not part of the standard product installation. The file does exist — on the installer CD for both Macintosh and Windows. You just need to copy the Acrobat 8 Help.pdf file to your drive if you want a copy readily available.

As the popular exclamation goes: That’s not all!

In the Help Resource Center on Adobe.com, you’ll find complete product Help and documentation — choose the product from the drop-down menu listing to go to a page of related resources. Each product-specific page includes links to an online HTML version or a downloadable PDF of the Help file for that application — including Acrobat 8 Professional, Acrobat 8 Standard (Windows only), Adobe Reader 8 and Acrobat Connect. Most also include a separate “Getting Started” document.

The following PDFs for each of these Help files are available for download:

• Acrobat 8 Professional [PDF: 24.5 MB]
• Acrobat 8 Standard (Windows only) [PDF: 16.6 MB]
• Adobe Reader 8 [PDF: 6.9 MB]
• Acrobat Connect Enterprise [PDF: 8.2 MB]
• Acrobat Connect [PDF: 2.1 MB]

NOTE: If you plan to download more than one of the Help files from Adobe.com, be aware that the different documents have the same help.pdf filename, so you could end up inadvertently overwriting files.

One of the ironies of the annual Super Bowl event is that the actual football game more often than not ends up being anything but memorable — with some notable exceptions. This Sunday the Indianapolis Colts and the Chicago Bears hope to take part in an exceptional contest, and there undoubtedly are a few good story lines, such as the first two African-American head coaches to achieve the National Football League championship.

But given the entertainment spectacle the Super Bowl has become — now in its XLI year — many people around the world who tune in actually have little or no interest in the game itself. Increasingly, the focus has become the television commercials and the competition among the various big-spending sponsors to get the best ratings … or at least the most laughs.

The San Francisco Chronicle is catering to this weekend’s ad-watching viewers, posting for download from its website a set of PDF-based Super Bowl bingo cards. Designed to “create some excitement at your Super Bowl party,” the set of made-to-print cards [PDF: 272kb] are meant to encourage party guests to bet on the commercials, as follows:

“Contestants buy their boards when they arrive at your party. Throughout the game, they cross out squares as commercials air.”

As with traditional bingo, “the first contestant to score a horizontal, vertical or diagonal row wins a prize.”

There’s also a set of blank bingo cards [PDF: 34kb] — you’ll need to print and then fill in the different ads. (See the official list of sponsors at Advertising Age.)

After both the game and the bingo competition, find out who won the ad wars at Advertising Age’s Super Bowl coverage site.