Tips & Tricks for Creative Professionals and Technical Writers using the Adobe Creative Suite & the Adobe Technical Communications Suite

by David R. Mankin

We all used to share documents by shooting them back and forth via email.  Many people still do.  Not me – not anymore.  I signed up for my free Acrobat.com account right after Adobe made the amazing service available.  I’ve written about it several times.  From a browser on any computer in any office, train station or coffee shop, I can log in and access my online-hosted documents, as well as any files that a friend or colleague has specifically shared with me.  I can create a spreadsheet, presentation or word processing document from scratch as well.  Nice.

Recently, Adobe has again upped the ante with its Acrobat.com service, and has integrated a new feature called Shared Workspaces.  Instead of sharing individual files with others, you can now set up an online workspace into which you upload or copy files.  Instead of sharing these files one at a time, you can now share the entire workspace at once.  The free service allows for one shared workspace (into which you can create your own folders), but Acrobat.com’s pay service enables multiple workspaces.  Mighty tempting!

Your colleagues can log in from anywhere and access the contents of the workspace.  Working on a project with Bill from the San Francisco office?  No problem.  Share away.  Want to know if Bill has logged in to access the project’s files?  All that information is there for you to see.  Any participant can upload and download files to utilize.  If they make edits, they may upload the revised doc, but not to worry – they’ll receive a rename/overwrite option before they can replace the online version with their edits.

Folks who attend my Acrobat training sessions around the world (both virtually & in the classroom) are always surprised at how flexible, interactive and useful a PDF file can be.  Don’t let your PDF files sit there and only ask to be looked at and printed. They can be much more useful in the workplace… and so can you. Once you learn what Acrobat technology can do.

Learn what PDF technology is all about… and how to use Acrobat 9 to create, edit & enhance your PDF files.  I offer training classes in Adobe Acrobat 9, either in your facility or online.

by David R. Mankin

You want a big sign!  Nothing permanent, but you’d like to make a quick, VERY large printout.  Your printer, however, can’t accommodate paper larger than legal size.  Let me show you how to print a “normal-sized” document to larger proportions… using Acrobat!

The print dialog box in Acrobat is one of the most flexible and thorough I’ve ever seen.  If you think about it, it would have to be feature-rich, since professional print shops accept PDF files as press-ready media.  The secret to printing a PDF file to a desired size is in the Page Scaling dropdown.  To print an 8.5 X 11 inch page to poster size, you’ll change the Page Scaling option to Tile all pages.  Next, select a desired Tile Scale percentage.  In my example, I chose 200%.  The print preview on the right shows exactly how the pages will be imposed onto (in this example) 6 letter-sized pages.  I kept the default Overlap of 0.005 inches, but you can dial in whatever you’d like.  All that’s left is to print and assemble your pages like a puzzle – either with tape, glue stick, etc.  That was easy.  You can use the page scaling options to print multiple pages per sheet of paper as well.

So it seems you can either save the environment by printing a document on fewer sheets, or ruin our planet for future generations by making posters out of letter-sized PDF files.  So much power in your hands from one dialog box!

Who knew?  If that type of print page scaling flexibility came as a surprise, you might want to consider signing up for some training. Learn what PDF technology is all about… and how to use Acrobat 9 to create, edit & enhance your PDF files.  I offer training classes in Adobe Acrobat 9, either in your facility or online.

by Barb Binder

One of the FrameMaker features I rely on heavily for my technical documents is the use of “live” headers and footers. Once I get them set up, they will automatically pull text off of my page into the running heads so that the reader can quickly see what chapter they are in, or what section, or both.I accomplish this through the use of System Variables. There are lots of variables in FrameMaker, but the ones I’m talking about here are the Running H/F variables. To use them you need to begin by identifying the text in the document that you would like to appear in your running heads. The usual suspects would be the chapter title and the section titles. Once you identify the text, you need to jot down the exact spelling of the paragraph formats that are assigned to them. If you are using the default paragraph format names, these might be “Title” and “Heading1″. The names themselves don’t matter, but matching the spelling and capitalization does, so you need to know exactly what the format names are, before proceeding. Ready? Here we go:

by Barb Binder

Like most modern computer users, I’m a big fan of copy & paste. I bet you are too, but have you ever wondered about FrameMaker’s Copy Special? What’s it all about, Alphie?

Basically, Copy Special extends the copying option to formatting, condition tags and even table column widths. Of course, once these items are in the clipboard, you can paste them elsewhere in your documents.

When you place your cursor within a text flow, and then choose Edit > Copy Special, you can select from four options:

1. Character Format. Pick this one when your cursor is sitting inside a Character format. Then, highlight a word or phrase and tap Control + v (it’s always Paste, not Paste Special with a Copy Special) to paste the Character format onto the selected text.
2. Paragraph Format. Pick this one when your cursor is anywhere inside a paragraph. The paragraph format is copied to the clipboard and you can paste it onto any paragraph that needs the same format applied, by simply clicking into the new paragraph and tapping Control + v.
3. Conditional Text Settings. You can use this to avoid the notoriously-difficult Conditional Text pod/panel combo to apply Condition Tags. Place your cursor within a condition tag, Copy Special to copy the tag to the clipboard, highlight words, anchored frames and/or table cells and tap Control + v to assign the condition tag to the selected object.
4. Table Column Width. If your cursor is in a table, you can copy the column width value, select one or more columns, and paste to make them all the same.

Now, those of you who want to be really clever can combine Copy Special with Find/Change. An example of a regular F/C activity in my workflow is to find all of the bulleted paragraphs in a file imported into FrameMaker from Word and change them to my Bullet paragraph format. Here are the steps:

1. Assign the Bullet format to the first bullet item.
2. Click inside and choose Edit > Copy Special > Paragraph Format.
3. Open Edit > Find/Change and set it up as follows to search for all single bullets followed by a tab, and change it by pasting the Bullet format
   
4. Use Find, Change, Change & Find and/or Change All to update the document(s).
5. This particular technique leaves me with double bullets (the original Word bullets plus the ones I defined in my Paragraph Format), so I finish up with:
   
   to search for all of the bullets and tabs and replace with nothing.

by Barb Binder

Text Insets are great when you need to publish the same copy in several locations. Perhaps it is your mission statement, or a description of your company. Rather than rely on a Copy & Paste technique, which necessitates editing multiple documents when the need arises to revise the copy, you can work with just one file as a Text Inset.