Acrobat 9

A fellow co-worker called me today with a request on how to use Acrobat 9. I’m looking at my machine and I still have 8!! Great. Wondermus when I’m a step behind… But she still needed help and was looking for some good resources.

So I put together a list of good tutorials and videos for her (and for me).

• Acrobat 9 Pro Essential Training – lynda.com Online Training Library®
  Acrobat training — have to pay for all videos, but most basics are available for free
• Free Adobe Acrobat Tutorials | Layers Magazine
• Adobe Creative Suite Video Podcast
  Acrobat videos
• AdobeTV – Acrobat

I also put in a request for a couple books for the library to order:

• Adobe Acrobat 9 Classroom in a Book by Adobe Creative Team
  Paperback ISBN-13: 9780321552976 Pub. Date: 08/22/2008
• Adobe Acrobat 9 How-Tos : 125 Essential Techniques by Peachpit Press
  Paperback ISBN-13: 9780321552945 Pub. Date: 08/18/2008

I work in a library, and I’m not a librarian. But I play one on TV.

–w

the afternoon session…

Illustrator. sweet. learned a trick with the pen tool — although i don’t think the instructor meant this as a bonus but if you use the plus and minus keys to easily add/subtract points. Also use the control key for direct select and the alt key for instant access to the bezier curve.

1. Multiple strokes and fills are possible in one object… think rainbows (ha ha creepy)
2. step and repeat is found through Effect> Distort> Transform
3. live paint and live paint selection tool… imagine creating your own coloring book page.
4. symbols. create own by select and drag into symbols panel. Folder is found under Illustrator/Presets. Good resource: Adobe Studio Exchange.
5. animation (flash): ahhhh…. If element to be animated has various positions in different layers (in order, obviously) then use the save2web and utilize the layers… you’ll have to play with the settings…. Of course — flash gives more options… but in one app, you can create a 3d die (you know, playing die) and spin it in various layers, and ta-da!!!!

Photoshop. Really thinking that this may have been the same presenter that did the 2day mastering photoshop i attended with lavera 2+ years ago…

1. Played in panorama/photomerge feature (very large process — NEED RAM warning for those who wonder why this putzes around)
2. The crop took can be used as a bonus canvas tool… 
3. Vanishing point play…
4. Better Layer Masks: (there’s a good link from delicious, btw “mastering photoshop notes”)
   1. Create an alpha channel,
   2. dodge/burn to per-fect channel on hair, leaves, etc…
5. If need to scale up small files, make sure file has bicubic smoothing turned on.
6. LAB separates Color from Density.

InDesign. My main purpose for attending this conference was this software. Touched on all the good stuff — styles (character, paragraph, and object), text wrapping, clipping paths from photoshop, and even more on pdf settings for proofs/printers. *sigh* Notes to self include:

1. page shuffling is possible — like a 4 page layout 4/1, 2/3
2. Previews can look better (yay!). turn on the feature in Object > Display Performance.
3. Color settings for Print — use North American Pre Press. Also, even in Photoshop, use color space of Adobe RGB, not the sRGB…
4. Clipping paths – perhaps i’ll have better luck doing this through the “place” option in the first place?
5. PDF Presets: pdfx started industry standards. pdfx4 includes layers and transparencies. *eureka*
6. ctrl+shift can select any locked master element to create a local override. But then, you can also remove all local overrides if needed.
7. directional feather elements — you know fade in from top to bottom…

side note: Marzware.com has preflight and conversion tools… such as converting a quark file to indesign…

Books/Videos/Stuff I want:

• Adobe Photoshop CS3 One on One by Deke McClelland
• Adobe InDesign CS3 One on One by Deke McClelland who apparently was the guy that wrote the Quark Bible books until he couldn’t layout the book the way he wanted to in Quark… so he went to InDesign…
• Web Design Workshop by Robin Williams (not the comedian)
• Robin Williams Design Workshop. This is the 2nd edition of the book that I requested the library to order — and i use the first edition as an inspiration tool… invaluable.
• Graphics Artist Guild Handbook
• Total Training CS3 Design Premium Video Bundle
• Wacom Graphire tablet. wireless. ’nuff said.

On the other hand, hotel internet is aggravating. husband had luck last night. I managed for a few minutes this morning from the hotel room before my conference -whoo hooo! Morning during the conference was no-go, but after lunch found another possible network — and was perfect. But I was paying attention to the speaker and the sessions, and not the *stuff* that I want to browse to now. And now? Hmph. *grumble.*

Anyways. Will have to get family ready for dinner soon. then hope to see Mt. Rushmore lit up tonight. If only I had internet to tell me where to go for dinner….

–wns.

the morning session…

the hardest part of this conference is that it’s split into 2 tracks — web and print. And since I’m both, I’m feeling extremely torn. But I’m going to focus on the print tracks, primarily because I attended Web Design World last year, and I really need to know and understand more of the features in my printing life, since that’s been a priority in both my jobs lately.

 the way, the conference I’m attending has two presenters both of which are Adobe Certified, seem to know their game, and so I feel like I’m in good hands. One of the presenters (which I chose to stick with his track btw) used to work at Industrial Light and Magic. Perhaps you can see why I chose to stay here.

We first covered Adobe Bridge. I think the best thing I’m taking from this particular session is a better understanding of Camera Raw and the ability to use Camera Raw to edit Jpeg.

Next up is Acrobat. And I’m afraid that my precious laptop might not stay in the game for rest of the morning. Husband took the kids to Old MacDonald’s Farm (and forgot the camera) But I just want them to have fun.

—

had lunch at Minerva’s. Bistro club was really yummy. Kids are having a blast at the farm, which is exactly what I wanted. Husband even sounded as if he were enjoying himself.

The Acrobat session was fairly intuitive. Discussed OCR, security features, digital signatures and advanced editing. Apparently Omnipage was bought by adobe… har har har…

well.. on to the next.

cs3 conference

I’m sitting in my hotel room in rapid, waiting patiently for internet. This is one reason why I wanted family to come along — husband can help me get online. Hopefully it’s just a fluke tonight — or really busy with other people.

Tomorrow, I am attending a 1-day conference for adobe cs3 software — a look at all the new features of the software. I’m pretty excited. It’s a skillpath training, and hopefully i’ll bring back some good ideas and major inspiration.

On the other hand, the hotel has a waterpark — with a pirate theme and wild water slides, and needless to say, we’ve had a blast so far.

I will post this as soon as I’m able to.

Acrobat forms…

I’ve always been pretty comfortable in Adobe Acrobat, even creating forms. I even managed for one of my first PDF form projects to make a completely interactive form for Classifieds, that added each word, multiplied by the price per word, added in tax, and ta-da!!! Of course, the company no longer uses said form because they have since changed their prices and I guess no one else could figure out how to change those forms… too bad…

Now Adobe has LiveCycle Designer, which is a pretty good little wizard that automatically works up most of the obvious parts of the form for you. I do admit, that I resisted because I was pretty comfortable in Acrobat itself, until we upgraded to CS3. Now, to create forms, one must use LiveCycle.

The only thing that I miss is my incessant habit of copy/paste because when you do this with anything other than text fields, it’s twice as much work to get it to work properly… but this is why we need to stretch our abilities, right?

I did have a fellow info. officer ask about how to adjust the tab order in her form. She too, likes to copy/paste — especially when you have some text fields that are already formatted… I totally get this. My first advice to her was to make sure her Hierarchy was in order. And, she still had issues… So, off for another answer…

I found it… here goes:

1. Ok. First, under the View menu, click tab Order. This has a pop up screen that quickly tells you how to proceed, but after you close this, it will now show you the numbered order of all your fields.
2. Second, Shift+click the first field and then click all the rest of the fields in order. You’ll notice as they “gray” out, they are in order from left-right, top-bottom.

The only thing that would suck with this, is if you have a HUGE form with many many fields… you could be clicking fields in order all day… But it does attempt to keep in order as best as it could. And apparently, other people have had issues with forms that consist of more than one page… But we’ll get to those bridges when we get there… more like burn…