Ted Padova’s AUC Blog

I posted an article on the shortcomings of Acrobat 8 and one of those items I mentioned in that blog post is a feature I wanted to see for creating PDFs from templates. I know everyone who browses the blogs on Acrobat Users is going to want to get Acrobat 8 in your hands soon and you probably can’t wait for the release date to come fast enough —at least if you find some interesting new feature you want to try out. If you’re impatient, I thought I’d add a little tip here you can use now in Acrobat 7 and later when you upgrade to Acrobat 8.

By nature, I’m a lazy person and I don’t like spending time doing anything that can be called work. I’d much rather save time and spend it on the golf course. One of my time consuming tasks that keeps me off the first tee is searching my hard drive looking for files. Where could it be? —in the Acrobat 8 folder, in the last conference session folder, maybe in the conference folder prior to the last event. I could look in the Organizer, but my Organizer list keeps growing and I really can’t find anything quickly there.

What I want and what I’ve asked Adobe for is a command in the Create PDF task button submenu to create a PDF from a template. There are a few files I work with routinely like an invoice form when I can find someone to pay me for hearing my gripes, or maybe a purchase order form, a PDF greeting card, an approval memo, or any other type of document you use routinely in your work. One of my routine files I send out weekly is a greeting card to Thom Parker informing him of the weather in Honolulu while it rains cats and dogs in Portland. Don’t feel sorry for Thom, he calls me when he’s making some fabulous dinner when I’m eating Chef Boyardee and soda crackers.

Now, wouldn’t it be nice if you could select Create PDF > From Template to open a submenu where you could select a file from a dozen or so that you work with on a regular basis? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to create a new file from a form you created in Adobe Designer? Wouldn’t it be nice to click the Save button and know that your original template file won’t be overwritten?

Unfortunately, Adobe didn’t give us this feature in Acrobat 8, despite my pleas. So I developed a little workaround you can use now in Acrobat 7 and continue using the same workaround in Acrobat 8 when you upgrade to the new version.

Like I said, I could put my files in the Organizer, but my Organizer tends to get cluttered and if I open a file in the Organizer I’ll more than likely overwrite my template. To be sure I have my files easily accessible and insure protection against overwriting them, here’s what I do in Acrobat Professional:

Create a template file. In my example I’ll use my weekly greeting card I send to Thom. As an option you can add a Document Title to your file using a name descriptive of the type of template you have. If you don’t have a Document Title in the file, you can select the document by file name.

Open the DocTemplates folder. On Windows the path is: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Acrobat 7.0\Acrobat\DocTemplates\ENU (be sure to change Acrobat 7.0 to Acrobat 8.0 when you upgrade.On the Mac open your Applications folder and open the Acrobat 7.0 folder (8.0 after you upgrade). Click once on the Adobe Acrobat Professional icon being certain to not double click to launch the program. Press the Control key down and click to open a context menu. From the menu items select Show Package Contents. A folder opens with a single folder appearing as Contents.Open this folder and the path isContents\Resources\en.lproj\DocTemplates
Note that if you are using a version of Acrobat other than English replace the en.lproj (ENU on Windows) folder for de.lproj for German (DEU on Windows) or fr.lproj (FRA on Windows) for French, etc.

Copy your template to the DocTemplates folder. Inside the DocTemplates folder you’ll find three templates titled template.1, template.2, and template.3. You can create a subfolder in the DocTemplates folder to keep your files together and apart from the default templates installed by Acrobat as I did in Figure 1.

Copy your template file to either the DocTemplates folder or a subfolder inside the DocTemplates folder.

Launch Acrobat. If you had Acrobat open, quit and relaunch the program.

Create a PDF from your template. The DocTemplates files are used for Secure PDF Delivery. Create Security Envelope in Acrobat 8 Select Secure PDF Delivery from the Secure task button pull-down menu. In Acrobat 8, the menu appears as shown in Figure 2.

After selecting the menu command the Create Security Envelope wizard opens. Add a file attachment. The Create Security Envelope was designed for adding file attachments to a secure envelope. We can’t proceed in the wizard unless we add a file attachment, but don’t worry, we’ll delete the attachment later. Click the Add File to Send button shown in Figure 3 and select any file you see in the dialog box that opens.

Select your template. Click the Next button and you’ll see all the templates you added to the DocTemplates folder. Select the template you want to use.

Select a delivery method. In Acrobat 7 you have a choice for emailing your template or completing it manually. Choose the Complete the eEnvelope Manually option. In Acrobat 8 click the Send the envelope later radio button as shown in Figure 4.

Finish. Click Next and Acrobat prompts you to secure the file. Disregard this wizard pane and click Next. A warning dialog box opens. Click Yes to confirm you don’t want to add security and you arrive at the last pane. Click Finish and the file opens in Acrobat.

Remove the File Attachment. We couldn’t progress through the wizard without adding a file attachment. It’s not needed in this example, so I delete the attachment by opening the Attachments panel and click the Delete button after selecting the attachment as shown in Figure 5. Your file is ready to go and when you save the file, Acrobat prompts you for a name and folder location. Your original template file remains intact and ready to use again.

At first glance the steps may seem a little elaborate but after using this method you’ll find working with files routinely to be much faster than searching your hard drive or an overcrowded Organizer. This workaround is necessary because Adobe hasn’t added a feature like Create PDF > From Template. A much neater workflow would be to have the command in the Create PDF task button without having to step through a wizard, add a file attachment, dismiss security, and delete the file attachment.

ted

This entry was posted on Monday, September 18th, 2006 at 12:13 am and is filed under Acrobat 8. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.