Large companies tend to be charry of handing out Acrobat Pro to just anyone, and you’re not one of the chosen. Or you work from home and can’t afford a copy…can you create a PDF? Yes! See item 6 in the Acrobat FAQ.
For more information about PDFs, check out the Adobe Acrobat 9 PDF Bible
The site has updated with lots of new information. An Adobe Acrobat Faux Wiki has been added with a couple of supporting pages to address some of those nagging PDF issues and open the floor to questions and tips.
There’s a new page on how to get rid of that annoying markup that remains when you print Word documents after tracking changes here.
Ever paste a table into Excel, only to have it all show up in one cell? Here’s a solution that’s just been moved into the Word Faux Wiki.
There’s a page on The Wonder of Snag-it, a big problem solver for admins.
Finally, there’s a new post right below this one on how to count multiple variables in Excel that will eventually become part of an Excel section.
You might notice a few more little ads at the bottom of the pages. I remain committed to keeping it to a minimum, but I could use a little help supporting site, so if you want any of the software or books you see here, click through!
If you want to be notified of the updates on this site, click on RSS or on “RSS” down at the very bottom of the page. Once you’re there, choose “subscribe in mail” near the bottom of the right hand sidebar.
Cheers!
We tend to think of PDF files as carved in stone, but if you have Acrobat Pro, you have a chisel. It’s not always easy, but there are some tools for touching up text that often work quite well. Today was not one of those days for me.
I had a document that merely needed a change to the signature block. Piece of cake. Open it in Pro, use the the “Touch Up Text” tool and change it. Do you hear the gong? If the document has been created in a font that your system doesn’t have, you can’t edit the text. Nope. Not at all. No cheating, no tricks, not gonna happen. Deep breath: there’s a workaround.
See that little camera? It’s called the snapshot tool. Click on the camera, then drag around the whole document except the signature block. As soon as you let go, it’s on your clipboard. Paste it into Word and drag your margins out to the edges. You should now have the same page you saw in the PDF with room at the bottom. Add in your signature block and you’re finished. Have a footer? Do the same thing with the footer; just paste it after the signature block.
OK, it’s not perfect because – DUH! -you don’t have the font. It’s better than not having the document, though, and you can do the signature in a similar font and disguise it with italics or bold, or insert it in a harmonious font.
Another workaround: scan the document and follow the directions here to turn it into a Word document. Make your changes and, if you want, save it as a PDF.
And that was my day.
Your executive asks you to print off that article on Golfing Underwater he saw on www.throwawaybigbucks.com. Piece of cake, right? You print from Explorer…and the right edge is cut off. Phooey.
You set your page to landscape. The right side is STILL cut off.
If you have Acrobat, so you try printing to PDF. No joy.
After you kick the printer a couple of times, you try to cut and paste the article into a Word doc. Either it’s protected and won’t let you, or you get all of the golf clubs and bubbles and Montblac ads on the page mixed into the article. You pick out the article sentence by sentence and paste it into a new doc, and print that.
Only 45 minutes later, and you’ve printed an article! You’re not embarrassed…much. Don’t let this happen to you!
Tell your IT department that it’s crucial for you to have Adobe Acrobat PRO, and that it needs to be set up so that you have its icon in Explorer. For reasons I don’t even want to contemplate, if you choose “convert web page to pdf” from this icon, it will create a perfect document, but if you choose File>Print and choose Adobe Acrobat as the printer it will make a PDF with a cut-off right edge. Obtain the icon, even if you have to bite ankles to do it.
UPDATE: MS Explorer 2007 claims to have solved this problem, so that’s another solution.
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