Ted Padova’s AUC Blog

Lori DeFurio has a nice post on setting up URL links in PDFs to view PDF files with a number of different options such as jumping to a specific page, opening the Bookmarks panel, and more. Check out her blog post at: Linking to specific pages in a PDF.

What’s mentioned in Lori’s post has to do with appending the open parameter using the Open a web page action in Acrobat. If you want to open a PDF in a new browser window from a PDF viewed in a browser window, you need a little help using JavaScript.

Create a button field or link and in the Action tab, select Run a JavaScript from the Select Action pull-down menu. Click the Add button to open the JavaScript Editor and type the following code in the Editor window:

app.launchURL(”http://www.mycompany.com/pdfDocument.pdf”, true);

In the above code, replace www.mycompany.com with your URL. Replace pdfDocument.pdf with the name of the PDF you want to open. The true statement triggers opening the PDF in a new browser window.

ted

The new PDF Packages feature in Adobe Acrobat 8 is ideal for instructors and trainers to create content complete with an examination form. In this example I created a custom cover page for the PDF Package that is used for some instructor and couse information. The form fields contain class meeting hours, instructor office hours, a couse description and similar data.

The main document is a learning module with reading and recommended resources. Navigational buttons are contained on the document for easy browsing. When a student finishes reading over the learning module a simple button click opens the thrid file in the PDF Package. This file is a form enabled with Adobe Reader usage rights. The student completes the exam in the free Adobe Reader software and clicks the Submit button to send the exam back to the instructor. Since the form is a single PDF document, only the exam results are returned to the instructor.

Take a look at the video to see some possibilities for creating courseware using Adobe Acrobat Professional and some of the new features in Acrobat 8.

benji.htm

This blog thread is designed for educational administrators and faculty who want to learn more about Acrobat and PDF in education. To kick off this thread, I added a little demonstration file created in Adobe Captivate illustrating how one might use both Captivate and Acrobat for courseware.

The example file is a demonstration for how a faculty member might use Adobe Captivate to instruct students on how to use a PDF file enabled with Adobe Reader usage rights for a lesson in basic Russian. Because Acrobat supports rich media it’s a perfect tool for a language lesson where an instructor’s audio can be heard; and with the PDF enabled with Reader usage rights, the students can record audio responses, take a test, and email the PDF back to the instructor.

To see this example, click the link below.

Russian 101A

The PDF file (6.1MB) used in the demonstration can be downloaded by clicking the link below.

Russian 101A PDF File

Anyone in education or training who has thoughts, ideas, questions, etc. about Acrobat PDF or Adobe Captivate please add your comments and suggestions.

Acrobat 8 has a number of enhancements not included on everyone’s top ten lists. One of these is a set of new commands that enable you to resize, rotate, and crop images right in Acrobat. To start with, take a look at the link below demonstrating resizing images in Acrobat 8.

Scaling Images.htm

Part II of the video shows you how to crop and rotate images in Acrobat 8.

cropRotate.htm

Here are a few tips on creating and ordering bookmarksfor novice users.

Click below to open the Flash file.

bookmarks.htm