Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

The now-concluded Adobe Acrobat & PDF Central Conference in Minneapolis not only offered attendees useful information about the varied applications of Adobe Acrobat & PDF, but sent them home with a great example of event organizers practicing what they preach.

Many sessions included references to and demonstrations of some of the new Acrobat 9 features — among them the PDF Portfolio capability that is an enhancement of the PDF Packages feature introduced in Acrobat 8. The conference website offers most of the speaker presentations  as individual downloads, a process that requires a lot of manual effort and results in a folder/directory of seemingly unrelated files — in a variety of file types — with uncertain content (judgments often based on cryptic filenames).

To save them the effort, registered attendees were each provided with a flash drive containing all of the available presentations. Better than the download-time savings, what the conference audience found on the drives was not an assorted collection of files, but rather a single, organized PDF Portfolio containing all of the presentations, complete with detailed descriptions of the content of each session.

It gave attendees an opportunity to actually experience some of the benefits that they heard discussed in many of the sessions, and likely intrigued a number of them to want to create similar PDF Portfolios of their own for their respective companies or organizations.

You can find other sources of inspiration in our PDF Portfolio Gallery on AcrobatUsers.com. And if you create something you’re proud of and are willing to share with our community, you could submit it in our Acrobat 9 PDF Portfolios contest — the fast-approaching deadline is October 7.

Another date to put on the calendar is next year’s Adobe Acrobat & PDF Central Conference: September 22-24, 2009 in Minneapolis. Kudos to the Easel Solutions staff who organized this year’s great event!

At the tail end of the Thursday morning keynote presentation at the Adobe Acrobat & PDF Central Conference, the microphone was passed to Duff Johnson of Document Solutions, Inc., to make a brief announcement. Johnson, with a widely respected expertise in PDF conversion, document scanning and management, PDF standards and compliance, and accessibility, is one of the handful of expert speakers at the Minneapolis event.

He officially announced to conference attendees what he’d already revealed a day earlier in an e-mailed news release (and in retrospect, by his conspicuous presence in the Appligent trade show booth here earlier in the day) and in his PDF Perspectives blog at AcrobatUsers.com, and which we discussed a bit further during breakfast at nearby (and highly recommended) Hell’s Kitchen this morning: His company is merging with Appligent, another well-regarded, long-time vendor in the Acrobat and PDF marketplace. Based in Pennsylvania, Appligent has a solid reputation within the PDF ecosystem, offering a range of products and services. The new company — for which Johnson becomes CEO — will be called Appligent Document Solutions; he will remain based in the Boston area. Appligent’s Virginia Gavin will be the President and Chief Operations Officer (COO) and Mark Gavin will be the Chief Technology Officer (CTO).

At this week’s conference, Johnson is leading breakout sessions on “PDF Meets Accessibility and Section 508″ and “PDF as Rapid Application Development Platform.”

Full details of the merger are available in a posted news release. [PDF: 130 kb]

People come to conferences such as this week’s Adobe Acrobat & PDF Central Conference in Minneapolis for different reasons, but a common one is the desire to find answers to product-related questions. And there’s ample opportunity to mingle with the expert speakers and other attendees over the course of the two-day event to do just that.

However, as became clear during the keynote address this morning that was being webcast live to a global audience, it’s sometimes easier to ask those questions that pop into your head when listening to a presentation when logged in rather than being physically present in the same room with the speakers. By my count, during this morning’s joint keynote by Ted Padova and Angie Okamoto titled “Differences between Acrobat Forms and LiveCycle Designer Forms,” virtual attendees received answers to more than 25 questions typed into the chatpod in Acrobat Connect during the one-hour session. In contrast, there was time at the end of the keynote for only one person in the room to ask a question.

The session itself was set up as good-natured sparring between Phillipines-based Ted & Nebraska-based Angie over the respective pros and cons of creating PDF forms with either Adobe Acrobat or with the free-standing (and Windows-only) LiveCycle Designer software. In reality, the two speakers are anything but combatants; rather, they’re just completing the task of  co-authoring a book due out in December — PDF Forms Using Acrobat & LiveCycle Designer Bible. But for the sake of the session, they continually challenged each other’s preferred tool (Ted/Acrobat vs. Angie/Designer), pointing out the perceived advantages of their favorite forms-creation tool.

While the on-site audience sat listening in the darkened room, the online attendees were busy typing questions, chattering about which speaker they agreed with or relating their own preferences or needs. Both Ali Hanyaloglu and Lori DeFurio of Adobe Systems were logged in and quickly responding to virtual queries. Granted, many of the typed Q&A exchanges were brief in nature, such as:

Larry Powell:  ”Designer work on a Mac?”

Ali Hanyaloglu: “No Designer for Mac, Windows only. But forms created with Designer work on the Mac.”

Another response provided an active link for easy exploration:

Karen G: ”Radio Buttons are a challenge to get in tabbing order in Designer. Is that being addressed in newer editions?”

Lori DeFurio: “Designer 8.2 has a new palette for tab order - if you want to try it - http://www.adobe.com/tryacrobat will give you Acrobat 9 + Designer 8.2.”

Sometimes the online exchanges were more entertaining than instructive, reflecting on perceptions gleaned from the webcast audio:

Susan Peirce: “Ted is louder than Angie. Can you change that?”

Ali Hanyaloglu: “They are sharing a microphone. Ted is louder than Angie most of the time ”

Predictably the session ended in a draw, with the expert speakers agreeing that neither Acrobat or Designer is the best choice for all forms needs and authoring circumstances. Anyone designing forms on a regular basis really needs to use both, and to understand the key features and limitations of each, they concluded.

Likewise, it seems clear from a pair of hybrid experiences the past two days — attending the conference keynotes in person and online simultaneously — there are ways they can overlap to enhance the user experience. Each has certain shortcomings, but finding ways to integrate them can both expand the audience and provide for greater opportunity to ask questions and get answers from a broader range of experts–who may or may not attending the conference in person.

You can download today’s keynote presentation [PDF: 2.7 MB ] to see the outlined advantages and disadvantages of Acrobat vs. Designer. However, the chatpod is now closed and the speakers are giving other sessions (as I write this). But you can always take your questions to the respective forms forums at AcrobatUsers.com.

While I’m on the subject of online educational opportunities and forms, the free eSeminar at AcrobatUsers.com for next month is on “Basic Fillable Forms and Form Tracking,” scheduled for Wednesday, October 15 at 10 a.m. US Pacific.

I hadn’t really stopped to think that it’s been more than 20 years since I lived and worked here in Minneapolis. But in riding the city’s light-rail train from the southern suburbs to downtown in less than 30 minutes today, I sampled for the first time one of the new (and very nice) transportation options that didn’t exist in 1987.

Soon thereafter during the opening morning keynote address by Ali Hanyaloglu, Acrobat product evangelist at Adobe Systems, I experienced this conference in a way that was in at least one high-tech way different from the many other Acrobat-oriented gatherings I’ve attended since the product’s earliest versions shipped.

Given the changing times, the 200 or so registered attendees seems an adequate turnout for such an event. Not all were in the main ballroom this morning as Ali was making a final test of the microphone and computer hookup for his upcoming presentation on “Interactive Workflow: Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com.”

He immediately noted to those physically present that we were being joined by a group of 150 or so virtual attendees, logging in live via Web browsers from across the country, as well as from more distant places such as Trinidad, Brazil and Australia. If so, then Ali’s online audience exceeded the one scattered across circular tables in front of him.

So even though I was watching Ali in person, I simultaneously accessed the online version of the presentation in order to follow along — a sort of hybrid-viewing experience — to get a firsthand feel for the pros and cons of each. I didn’t notice, but I suspect there were a few others in the room who might have been doing the same thing (and thus slightly skewing the virtual attendee numbers!).

There proved to be benefits and shortcomings from the differing vantage points. During a live demonstration where Ali showed how to do live sharing by connecting to and collaborating with a remote colleague, only the online audience could actually view the two screens side-by-side being controlled by either party. However, it wasn’t always smooth sailing online. Seated behind me, Thom Parker took an urgent cellphone call from Lori DeFurio of Adobe Systems, who was part of the virtual community. She said the live audio had suddenly dropped off for the online attendees. It was quickly restored, but they unfortunately missed some of Ali’s informative overview of the new PDF Portfolios feature in Acrobat 9.

The audio glitch aside, it was interesting that when Ali posed several questions to people in the room asking for a show of hands, the online folks also had an option in Acrobat Connect to “Raise Hand” (and several other feedback options)–and many did.

Only the two morning keynotes–another to open tomorrow’s final day–are being webcast live (and subsequently posted for on-demand viewing). But many of the other speakers have already made copies of their presentations and/or related resource files available for download from the Adobe Acrobat & PDF Central Conference website. Check back later to get additional speaker presentations.

If it’s Wednesday, this must be Minneapolis–at least for those of us attending the Adobe Acrobat & PDF Central Conference being held at the downtown convention center. I’ll be jumping on the light-rail train shortly to get from my suburban hotel to the site, and then will blog throughout the day–at the whim of the available Internet connection.

If you’re not here, you can still partake of this morning’s opening keynote presentation–just log in at 8:30 a.m. US Central to view the session live. Ditto for tomorrow morning’s second keynote. See details in last week’s blog postings.

More to come from Minneapolis soon!

If you missed yesterday’s live, one-hour eSeminar from AcrobatUsers.com on PDF & Flash — led by Ali Hanyaloglu of Adobe Systems — the on-demand version has now been posted.

You won’t be able to ask questions like those who attended the live session were able to do, but you can view Ali’s complete presentation and demonstrations, and download a pair of related PDFs. And if you do have questions on this topic, you can always post them in the Rich Media/Flash forum.

Further proof that PDF is not just for printing anymore (actually, it hasn’t been for some time, but Acrobat 9 takes the concept and reality of rich-media PDFs to another level) can be found at next week’s Adobe Acrobat & PDF Central Conference 2008 in Minneapolis, there will be a hands-on session on PDF & Flash led by Dustin Tauer of Easel Solutions, and a related talk on Dynamic Media in Electronic Publications by Bob Connolly of pdfPictures. See other recent blog posts for more about the upcoming conference.

Looking ahead, it’s not too early to register for next month’s free eSeminar on Basic Fillable Forms and Form Tracking, scheduled for Wednesday, October 15 at 10 a.m. U.S. Pacific.

As I mentioned yesterday, I’ll be posting live to this blog for several days next week from the Adobe Acrobat & PDF Central Conference 2008 in Minneapolis, providing one way for those unable to make the trip to glean highlights from some of the expert-led sessions. But wait — there’s more!

You will also be able to watch the daily keynote presentations on both 9/24 and 9/25 live online via Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro. Tune in with your Web browser at the appointed time [convert to your local timezone, if necessary] next Wednesday and Thursday to see:

• Wed., Sept. 24, 8:30-9:30 a.m. (US Central)
“Interactive Workflow: Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com”
Speaker: Ali Hanyaloglu of Adobe Systems

Description: If you are expected to do less, in more time, with unlimited resources, then you are one very fortunate person. For most of us, it is the complete opposite. So how can you produce a truly compelling document quickly, with input from many individuals, without having to utilize expensive resources that you may not even have? Desktop software and online hosted services come together beautifully in this situation, and this presentation will walk you through a “day-in-the-life” of working on and completing a valuable document using Acrobat 9 and Acrobat.com.

• Thu., Sept. 25, 8:30-9:30 a.m. (US Central)
“Differences Between Acrobat Forms and LiveCycle Forms”
Speakers: Ted Padova & Angie Okamoto

Description: Uncover the differences between AcroForms and Designer Forms. Before you start your form-creating process, you need to decide which is the correct product for your needs. Learn the important differences between AcroForms and Designer Forms.

Both sessions will be available online on the respective dates at http://adobechats.adobe.acrobat.com/pdfcentral2008.

One week from today the Adobe Acrobat & PDF Central Conference 2008 will open in downtown Minneapolis, MN with a kickoff  reception for registered attendees, followed by two days of expert-led sessions on all aspects of Acrobat and PDF usage.

Accordingly, I’m heading back to the not-so-twin city — considerably different from neighboring St. Paul in many respects, as any local can tell you — where I lived and worked for a dozen years. I’ll be providing live blog coverage for AcrobatUsers.com from a cross-section of the main conference sessions on September 24 and 25.

I’ll try to briefly report on as many of the topical sessions as I can manage to sample, sharing tidbits from the cast of well-regarded speakers, many whom I know and have learned from at previous conferences that showcased earlier versions of Acrobat, going back to its earliest days.

A key focus next week, of course, will be Acrobat 9.0, including sessions on PDF Portfolios, Flash & PDF, and the related Acrobat.com online services.

It’s not too late to register for the conference. Registered AUC members can get a $300 discount on the main conference fee. There are also several day-long pre-conference sessions next Tuesday, led by Ted Padova, Thom Parker and Angie Okamoto — each session has a separate fee and covers a specific topic.

But if you can’t make it to Minneapolis next week, I’ll do my best to share some highlights from the event with you here, beginning next Tuesday!

With today’s anniversary of an event seared into the collective memories of most people alive on September 11, 2001, we can expect to relive — fortunately to a lesser extent — the fateful terrorist attacks in the United States through media flashbacks and post-9/11 analyses.

But even those not yet born or too young to remember the hijacked airplane assaults that took place in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania can still get a feel for the shock, horror and uncertainty that gripped the country — and much of the world — in the first hours after the attacks. An online collection of more than 100 newspaper front pages from September 12, 2001, separately available for download as “readable PDFs,” preserves the raw emotion and first reactions. [The zoom tool in Acrobat comes in handy for navigating the different newspaper column widths and layouts.]

Among the historically significant electronic pages preserved at the website of the Newseum, a “museum of news” based in Washington, D.C., is page one of The New York Times, with the fully capitalized banner headline “U.S. ATTACKED.”

The New York Times front page for September 12, 2001 [PDF: 670kb]

The coverage offers a chilling reminder of what transpired:

“The horror arrived in episodic bursts of chilling disbelief, signified first by trembling floors, sharp eruptions, cracked windows. There was the actual unfathomable realization of a gaping, flaming hole in first one of the tall towers, and then the same thing all over again in its twin. There was the merciless sight of bodies helplessly tumbling out, some of them in flames.”

And another set the scene for the expected and challenging U.S. military reaction, an increasingly controversial effort that continues seven years later on several fronts:

“Today’s devastating and astonishingly well-coordinated attacks on the World Trade Center towers in New York and on the Pentagon outside of Washington plunged the nation into a warlike struggle against an enemy that will be hard to identify with certainty and hard to punish with precision.”

The Museum posts hundreds of newspaper pages every day in its Today’s Front Pages, and maintains an archive for select events, beginning with the 9/11 attack coverage. More recent collections include the 2008 Summer Olympics in Beijing, Pope Benedict’s Historic Visit and the 2008 Presidential Election 2008.

Let’s try this again.

Some months back — as part of a selection of Acrobat 9-related content we planned to publish on AcrobatUsers.com in tandem with Adobe’s announcement of the then-forthcoming new version — we featured an article titled “My top nine favorite new features in Acrobat 9” by well-known author and guru Ted Padova.

Number 2 on his list of “best new additions to the Acrobat 9 family of products” was PDF Portfolios, an enhancement of the PDF Packages capability rolled out in Acrobat 8. He wrote “Whereas PDF Packages were designed for assembling files together in a single package, PDF Portfolios offer the same features while expanding the capabilities with a new focus on presentation.” And to illustrate his point, he provided a sample PDF Portfolio file with a Flash-based Welcome page for readers to download.

Unfortunately, since Acrobat 9 and Adobe Reader 9 wouldn’t be available for a while yet — and a new PDF Portfolio would open as a PDF Package with Acrobat 8 — we were not able to include Ted’s PDF when his article was initially published. But we always intended to do so at a later date, after offering him a chance to update it again once the new versions were shipping. However, the prolific author has had a pretty full plate lately working on several upcoming books, including the Acrobat 9.0 PDF Bible and the PDF Forms Using Acrobat & LiveCycle Designer Bible.

Recently Ted found time to work on and provide us a new version, which we’ve now made available as a link from his article. His “101 Forms eTips” document as a PDF Portfolio — read the Colophon page for the details on how he created it — includes the following topical tips, a number specific to Acrobat 9 features:

PART A

Using Form Edit Mode

1. Using Run Form Field Recognition
2. Filling in Fields in Form Editing Mode
3. Using Form Tools
4. Adding a Field to a Form
5. Adding a Field in Viewer Mode
6. Zooming Views in Form Editing Mode
7. Comments in Form Editing Mode
8. Using Panels in Form Editing Mode
9. Renaming Fields

Editing Forms

10. Editing Images on a Form
11. Adding Document Properties
12. Flattening Fields
13. Replacing Pages
14. Replacing All Pages
15. Replacing Pages in Tiled Views
16. Scanning Paper Forms
17. Automating Detecting Fields
18. Exporting PDF Content
19. Exporting PDF Pages
20. Add a New Layer to a Form

Working with PDF Portfolios

21. Adding Forms to a PDF Portfolio
22. Enabling Forms a PDF Portfolio
23. Editing Forms in a PDF Portfolio
24. Adding Navigation Links to PDF Portfolios

Working with Fields

25. Creating Comb Fields
26. Creating Arbitrary Masks
27. Duplicating Fields on a Page
28. Adding Fields in Viewer Mode
29. Duplicating Buttons Across Multiple Pages
30. Adding Button Faces
31. Adding Rollovers to Button Faces
32. Formatting Field Appearances
33. Show/Hiding Fields
34. Creating Mutually Exclusive Radio Buttons
35. Creating Mutually Exclusive Check Boxes
36. Adding a Reset Button
37. Submitting Forms to eMail Addresses
38. Formatting Numbers
39. Placing Multiple Fields
40. Managing Fields
41. Copying/Pasting Blocks of Fields
42. Marking Fields Required
43. Setting Tab Orders
44. Adding Barcode Fields

PART B

Writing JavaScripts

45. Using the JavaScript Debugger
46. Setting Custom Zoom Levels
47. Navigating Views
48. Creating an Application Alert
49. Dismissing Application Alerts
50. Adding Line Breaks to Alerts
51. Invoking Actions on Field Entry
52. Assessing Viewer Versions
53. Testing Code in the JavaScript Console
54. Assessing Viewer Types
55. Assessing Document Information
56. Auto-tabbing Fields
57. Printing Pages Via JavaScript
58. Printing from the JavaScript Console
59. Eliminating Fields From Print
60. Printing with Annotations
61. Creating Document Actions
62. Date Stamping a Document
63. Summing Rows and Columns
64. Using Simplified Field Notation
65. Summing Data with JavaScript
66. Calculating a Sales Tax
67. Calculating a Shipping Charge
68. Importing Images
69. Showing/Hiding Fields
70. Resetting a Form
71. Setting Fields to Read Only
72. Deleting Fields
73. Deleting Zeros from Calculation Fields
74. Adding URLs to Text
75. URL Links in New Windows
76. Adding Annotations Using JavaScript
77. Adding Fields Using JavaScript
78. Determining x,y Coordinates
79. Changing Text Colors
80. Using Custom Colors
81. Spawning Pages From Templates
82. Changing OCG States
83. Limiting Character Strings
84. Popup Menus for URL Navigation
85. Popup Menus for Page Views
86. Popup Menus for Opening Files
87. Emailing a PDF
88. Emailing Form Data
89. Creating Fixed Response Options
90. Creating App Response Dialog Boxes
91. Adding Data to Secondary Forms

Adding Menu Items

92. About Adding Menu Commands
93. Counting Page Templates
94. Listing Menu Items
95. Adding a URL to a Menu
96. Add a File | New Menu Command

Working with data

97. Merging data into spreadsheets
98. Distributing Forms
99. Collecting Data Via Email
100. Collecting Data Via Acrobat.com
101. Tracking Forms