Wisdom of the PDF Sage

In response to my previous post, a long time friend and collegue (Claudia McCue of Practicalia - one of the best trainers I know) wrote to ask:

Thanks for passing this on, but it looks to me like the Crop Tool still just masks out content: prepress wants a REAL crop tool that destructively gets rid of extra content. Some pagination software ignores the Crop info and just looks at the “real” dimensions. I’ll keep looking to see if I’ve missed something, though.

Claudia - I am happy to report that Acrobat 9 answers your needs!  In fact, we provide two different ways to accomplish the task, depending on your particular workflow.

The best way to remove hidden information from a PDF - be it cropped data, unwanted metadata or other things that might be lurking about in your documents is the Examine Document command that was introduced in Acrobat 8.

In Acrobat 9, we have significantly improved this tool with more tests for hidden data, and an interactive display of the content to be removed so you can better pick and choose what stays and what goes.  Oh - and you can incorporate this into a Batch Sequence, if you want to do this to multiple PDFs.

Alternatively, for those who are more familiar with, or spend their time working with our Preflight tools - you’ll find two new Quick Fixes already provided for removing either information outside the CropBox or outside of Trim (more common in the print production world). 

Of course, if neither of those suits your exact needs - you can create your own fixup which deletes content from the area of your choice. And don’t forget that Preflight can also be called from a Batch Sequence or you can use the Droplets feature.

So Claudia - I hope that answers your questions and that you (and others) will find these new features helpful in your print production needs!  (P.S. In exchange, you buy the beer next time

One of the Acrobat engineers just shared with me a very useful feature that he put into Acrobat 9 to help out folks doing print production
with Acrobat. I thought I’d share it here.

Acrobat has had a Crop Tool since (at least) version 5, but that tool only let you set the CropBox of the page.  While useful for non-printing features, most printers didn’t like it because it only dealt with cropping while they deal with Bleed and Trim.   They could have used Acrobat’s Crop Pages dialog, but that requires you to type in values, and not work interactively and directly on the page.

Well not anymore!

Acrobat 9’s Crop Tool lets you set the newly drawn out area as the ArtBox, TrimBox, BleedBox or (of course) CropBox.  Just right-click (or control-click on a single button mouse) and at the top of the contextual menu are your choice of page boxes.

And with Acrobat 9 automatically showing the Art, Bleed and Trim boxes on the page, the result of your action is immediately visible.

As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve had two major projects during 2007 and 2008 - Acrobat 9, which is now shipping, and my work on the transitioning of PDF from Adobe to ISO, which I’ve spoken about as well.

However, while ISO 32000 (part 1) was ratified in January, the standard itself wasn’t actually published until yesterday.  But now you can run out, and for just a few Swiss Francs, get your own personalized copy of ISO 32000-1.

AIIM secretary, Betsy Fanning, writes in her blog:

While the committee’s initial work has been completed in getting the standard through the approval and pubication process, the committee’s work is far from over. The focus for the committee will now be to identify new features and functions that may be added to the PDF file and included in the standard. To follow the activities of the US committee for this standard, please visit http://www.aiim.org/Standards/article.aspx?ID=33223.

The committee is already at work on part 2 (or PDF 2.0, if you will), with our next meeting taking place in Beijing in October.  I look forward to seeing the first (of potentially many) submissions from others on what they’ve always wanted to see in PDF but have not had the chance to suggest before.   But now it really is "Everyone’s PDF".

It’’s already been reported all over the Internet already, but I wanted to also put a comment up here about their availability, since it’s been a huge part of my life for the last 18+ months.  It is also the first full version of Acrobat that I’ve helped design & develop, and most certainly the largest piece of software that I’ve been involved with in my more than 20 years in the software industry.

Here are some links and places to go, if you’ve not already done so:

• Adobe Reader 9 for Macintosh and Windows
  • NOTE: Unix platforms are coming….
• Demo/Trial version of Acrobat Pro Extended for Windows
• Purchase Acrobat
• Lori’s wonderful 6 Cool Things Seminar
• Our new How To Video Workshop

Also, Lori posted some excellent sample PDFs that demonstrate the new Portfolio and Flash integration - if you’d like to see the difference these features make to the PDF experience - and why Acrobat 9 is such a “game changer”!

• this PDF Portfolio, which contains some of the Acrobat 9 marketing materials and a Flash movie.
• this Flash application which includes a flash controller, flash playbar, flash movie and captions which can be useful for accessibility requirements, or subtitles for localization