Since the launch of Acrobat 9, we have seen more and more interesting examples of PDF Portfolios surfacing. And today Adobe launched eight new and updated layouts that provide Acrobat 9 Pro or Pro Extended users even more options to tailor the look and feel of their PDF Portfolios. More after the break…

These layouts offer increased customization options and additional methods for easily navigating files in a PDF Portfolio. On the Adobe.com downloads center, you can find these PDF Portfolio layouts and installation instructions for both Windows and Macintosh platforms. They are available in all Acrobat 9 language versions.

The new layouts were developed after conversations with Acrobat customers who expressed the additional value of further personalizing particular aspects of PDF Portfolios. Customers wanted the flexibility to optimize a PDF Portfolio depending on the specific file content and the purpose for creating it. This included customization of the description lengths and thumbnail sizes. They also mentioned that it was often very helpful to easily see when a particular file was last modified.

Some of the layouts are brand new while a few are enhanced versions of those available by default with Acrobat 9 Pro or Pro Extended.

The new layouts include:

Grid with Size Options

Users found the Basic Grid layout in Acrobat 9 very useful because they could easily see an overview of the PDF Portfolio contents on one screen and have quick access to the files. However, they wanted more control over how many files to display and how long the file descriptions were. In this new layout, there are grid size options and a compact card style that provides a higher density of files in a single view.

Grid with File Preview and

List with File Preview

In Acrobat 8 PDF Packages, users can view a compact list of the files and a file preview at the same time. Users liked the ability to show recipients key files in a portfolio with minimal navigation and mouse clicks required. These two new layouts better optimize this use case for Acrobat 9 and Reader 9.

Grid with Sidebar and

Sliding Row with Sidebar

Users wanted an intuitive way to navigate organized folders in a PDF Portfolio that was always available. These new layouts offer a sidebar navigation that quickly gives users a sense of what was contained in the portfolio and allows them to navigate to folders with little effort. Users felt that a sidebar navigation layout was flexible and could be used for many purposes.

The updated layouts include:

Revolve

Users liked the Revolve layout for its ability to engage recipients by bringing one file into focus at a time. This layout was especially useful for presentation of persuasive information such as marketing collateral or sales pitches. The updated Revolve layout now offers new options for narrow and wide file display and longer text.

Sliding Row

The Sliding Row layout displays several files and folders in a row. Users liked this layout for its visual appeal and clear organization. This new version now provides options for different size thumbnails or text descriptions lengths.

On an Image

Users considered the On an Image layout a novel concept and liked the ability to use a range of image backgrounds, which made it suitable for different purposes. The layout helped accurately communicate specific aspects of an image or a complex diagram. However, they voiced the need to customize the file markers. This was important to draw attention to the files and folders and to make sure the markers were clearly visible regardless what background image was chosen. With this new layout, there are new marker style options and better zoom control.

Sound interesting? Go ahead and download these PDF Portfolio layouts and give them a test drive. And for those who are feeling creative, submit your PDF Portfolio examples to the Acrobat 9 PDF Portfolio contest and be considered for a prize or display in the PDF Gallery.

Amy Wang, Acrobat Product Manager

A horizontal workflow requiring a consistent experience across document types? If that’s not Acrobat territory I don’t know what is. More after the break…

Our goal was to create a simple, yet powerful tool which could generate meaningful compare results on the wide variety of documents which can be converted to PDF. So that is why we worked on document comparison but how did we make it great?

Some example include:

• We give users flexibility in terms of what kinds of changes they want to see. For example, you can decide to see or not to see text formatting changes. You can make these decisions after the compare has occurred and those changes appear or disappear on the fly.
• We are using algorithms which are optimized to run on different types of source documents like text documents, slide decks and images. For example, when comparing PowerPoint presentations we can detect that slides have been moved and we compare the correct slides to each other. In text documents words can flow freely from one page to the next so we detect moves differently.
• We optimize compare results for different types of content like text, images, or tables. For example, when showing image changes, we highlight the areas of the image which have changed. When you mouse over those areas, we show you how the old image appeared.
• We used the existing annotation framework so that compare can leverage the power of Acrobat. After all, what do you do once you know what the changes are? Compare can be used seamlessly with other Acrobat workflows like shared reviews, real time collaboration and more.

We welcome any comments or suggestions so please give Compare a try and tell us what you think!

Cheers,

Carlos Araya, Acrobat Product Manager

Some of the reasons we’ve heard why users might need to archive their emails include:

1. Compliance with Regulatory or audit Requirements:
   • Companies in certain industries (e.g. healthcare, legal, financial services) are required by law to archive specific records, including email, for specific time periods.
   • All electronic data including emails is subject to the discovery process. When required by law, you are required to share all your emails with investigative agencies.
   • Line functions like Finance, Admin are required to save certain type of email communication like approvals etc for audit purpose. They resort to printing these emails and filing them in absence of a robust solution.
2. Archiving emails related to a project, case hearing etc.
   • After completing a project before moving on to another project, users can archive their project related emails to a secure archive and upload to a shared folder/document management system. If required, they or any team member (with valid access) can access these mails anytime in future.
   • An employee moving to a new project or company can convert his emails to an archive and hand that over as part of transitioning his responsibilities.

And PDF can be an excellent format for archiving your email:

• PDF being an open format eliminates the dependency on proprietary mail formats.
• PDFs are platform independent and can be viewed/printed on any computer having free Adobe Reader which is widely available.
• Once converted to PDF, you can work on your emails in Acrobat in conjunction with other PDF documents.
• You will still be able to open PDF mail archives created today many years from now.

Here are some of the highlights of the Acrobat email archiving solution:

1. Intuitive and Easy to use interface for archiving emails.  You can convert selected emails or entire folders to PDF in a single click, using the menu option:.
   
   You can also set up automatic archival of specific folders using the Automatic Archival feature. This feature incrementally archives the newer emails present in the specified folders at every scheduled run.
   
2. Support for Outlook and Lotus Notes: Acrobat 9 supports MS Outlook XP, 2003 & 2007 and Lotus Notes 6, 6.5, 7 & 8 for email archiving.
3. Advanced search functionality: PDF emails include the complete mail header info for the emails. These emails (including non PDF attachments) can be quickly located using Acrobat’s advanced search functionality.
4. Rich consumption experience: Acrobat 9 includes a flash based UI for users to easily view/print/search their archived emails. For more details, you can look at Rick Borstein’s video demonstration in his blog posting here.

So what are you waiting for? Start archiving your emails using Acrobat and share your experience with us. We look forward to hearing from you.

Thanks!

Aman Deep Nagpal, Acrobat Product Manager

Accessing the 3D measurement tool

We’ve had a measurement tool since the first release of Acrobat/Reader supporting 3D and we’ve tried to enhance the tool in every new release based on customer feedback. To access the tool, you have several options that are all equivalent, choosing one or another only depends on whether you prefer using the main menus or toolbar icons. Before you follow any of the 3 methods below, make sure you have a PDF with 3D open and that you have activated your 3D model.

1. Go to Menu>Tools>Analysis>Measuring Tool
2. Go to View>Toolbars>Analysis and click on the icon circled in red
3. On the 3D toolbar, click on this icon  (if you can’t find the tool, click on the drop down arrow next to the Rotate tool)

Note: you have to hover the mouse over the 3D model to turn the 3D measurement tool on. Otherwise, you may see the 2D tool controls appear.

If you have correctly followed one of the methods described above, here’s a snapshot of the 3D measurement toolbar you should be able to see on your screen:

You will notice at first sight a significant change in the user interface. Notably, we have separated out the control modes, such as the snap modes and the measurement types, from the feedback window that you should see displayed in the lower right hand corner as represented below:

We’ve also added a context menu to give you acces to the most common tools that you may need while in measurement mode. Here’s a snapshot of what you should see when right-clicking on the mouse while in measurement mode:

Feel free at this point to spend more time discovering the different options exposed in the menu above before moving on to the next section. To go back to the starting point, you can exit the measurement mode by hitting the ESC key and start over beginning with one of the three methods described above.

Creating a 3D measurement markup in Acrobat

Let’s first look at the user experience for creating a measurement markup in Acrobat, then we’ll continue with how it applies in Reader. First, we’ll start with the most natural method, then I will describe an alternative method to better control how to organize your measurement markups.

Start by clicking on the Home view   and use the mouse to set your camera view for best accessing the part or area you want to measure. Feel free to use the context menu to turn on/off the display of some parts or change the rendering mode to transparent for optimal display.

Tip: to use the mouse controls for navigation, hold the ALT key and click on the mouse buttons like you would normally do when the measurement tool is not turned on, i.e. LMB to rotate, RMB to zoom, LMB+RMB to pan.

Then pick any snap mode, edge points for instance  , and any measurement mode such as point to point   and measure a distance on your 3D model.

Note while you are moving your mouse to select your measurement end points, the feedback window is updated in real time and displays important information, similar to this:

Now select one of the highlighted points in red as you hover over your 3D model and select a second edge point highlighted in red to obtain the desired dimension. At this point, you should have the choice to place the measurement markup anywhere you want along the line connecting the two edge points you have selected. Click one more time and the markup will be placed relative to the current position of the mouse cursor.

Tip: while in snapping mode to select the end points of your measurement, use the right-click context menu to cancel the current selection by selecting the optin Cancel Measurement at the top.

If you see a green markup with some dimension like the one below, then you have successfully created a 3D measurment markup that you can now save with your PDF:

One more thing to note though is that a new view was automatically created for you. If you open the Model Tree and look at the list of views in the Views panel, you will notice a new view at the bottom of the list labeled something like MesurementView11 with a measurement markup attached to it. This is exactly the same way the Comment & Markup tool works with 3D models.

I will now teach you how to manage your 3D measurement markups by controlling which view they are attached to. Let’s imagine you have 3 parts in your model and you would like to create a series of 3D measurement markups for each of the 3 parts. The way 3D measurement markups and views work is very simple. If you have a view selected in the View panel, and you just add a new 3D measurement markup, the markup will automaticall get attached to the view selected. You can keep manipulating the 3D model for adding more dimensions, and all of the markups added will attach to the same view currently selected. Once you are ready to switch to another part, create a new view with that part and start adding new measurement markups. From this point on, the new 3D measurement markups will get added to the new view created. It’s only when no view is selected, that a new view will be created for you automatically. You can joggle from one view to another at any time to add more markups to a particular view. Check out the snapshot below of an example with 2 views and multiple measurement markups attached to each:

Finally, as you probably guessed by now, the 3D measurement markups are similar to any other markups you can apply using the Comment and Markup tool. The only difference is that 3D measurement markups are not necessarily converted into Comments, but you can selectively decide which ones to promote as a Comment. In order to turn a 3D measurement markup into a Comment, select the markup from the view panel or in the viewport, right-click and select the option Convert to Comment. After doing so on one of the measurement markup you created, if you open the Comments panel at the bottom of the Acrobat window, you will find your 3D measurement markup accessible there as well. Direclty clicking on the markup entry will take you directly to the view to which the markup belongs and display all of the other markups attached to that view.

Creating a 3D measurement markup in Reader

I am sure you are very familiar with the Reader Extensions concept. As a quick reminder, to enable a user to access the Comment/Markup, Measurement and Cross-Sectioning tools in the free Adobe Reader, the author of the PDF needs to enable that function using Acrobat. Here are the steps to take for doing so:

1. Open any PDF with 3D in Acrobat
2. Go to Comments>Enable for Commenting and Analysis in Adobe Reader
3. Save the file

The PDF saved as described above is referred as having Reader Extensions enabled. This simply means that if the PDF is opened in the free Adobe Reader, the following additional tools are turned on: Comment and Markup, Measurement, Cross-sectioning.

The reason it is important to mention the Reader Extensions capability is because otherwise anyone opening a normal PDF with 3D in Adobe Reader will not have the ability to make measurements nor add 3D measurement markups.

So go ahead and use the PDF previously created and apply Reader Extensions to it using Acrobat as indicated above. If you have Reader available on your machine, open that PDF in Reader and observe the Reader toolbar area and the 3D toolbar. You will notice that the Reader toolbar includes the Comment and Markup tool icons while the 3D toolbar includes the measurement and cross-sectioning tool icons. Here’s what you should be seeing:

If you open the Model Tree, and look at the list of views in the View panel, of course you will find the views you created previously and the 3D measurement markups attached to each view. Try clicking on one of the views or the markups directly and experience the exact same behavior as in Acrobat.

One difference though you will notice is when adding a new 3D measurement markup. Suppose you want to add a new markup to an existing view or you want to create a new view and attach a 3D measurement markup to it. The difference will simply be that any 3D measurement markup is automatically converted to a Comment. The reason for this behavior is that we don’t want a user participating in a review workflow to alter the original PDF without tracking each modification as a new Comment. Look at the snapshot below and notice the icon circled in red indicating the markup is also a Comment.

Conclusion

I hope you have enjoyed the material reviewed. Having the ability to save 3D measurement markups is indeed a key feature added in Acrobat/Reader 9 that many of you I am sure will get to use more and more. Here are some examples of use cases where saving 3D measurement markups would be most useful:

• Internal cross-functional design collaboration
• Extended design reviews with suppliers
• Feedback reports from shop floors

As always, we welcome your feedback and any suggestions you may have as well as your experience using Acrobat/Reader 9.

Cheers,

Pierre Tager, Acrobat Product Manager

Some examples of this use case include:

• Reviewing product packaging designs
• Commenting on draft copy of a book
• Surveying engineering drawings for construction sites
• Soliciting feedback on technical documentation
• Editing a client presentation before the sales pitch
• Redlining a legal contract

In our discussions with users, we learned the myriad of ways these review workflows are accomplished today. Some methods involve manual pen and paper markups of drawings or other documents. Some people send comments in the body of an email to the author of a document. Some may directly edit the files and overwrite or manually highlight changes. Others will use Word to track changes. Regardless, the all too common result is that the author receives back many emails or versions of the original file which leaves a confusing trail of input to reconcile.

In this exchange between the author and the reviewers, there are other challenges that arise. These include:

• Difficulty in tracking comments and managing review workflows
• Reviewers can’t see each other’s comments which results in duplicated effort
• Difficulty in collaborating with remote users
• Minimal control by the author to easily decide what changes to make
• Inability to easily review a variety of file types

Shared Reviews in Acrobat was designed to address these challenges head on. With Shared Reviews, you can centrally manage reviews through a network folder, SharePoint workspace, or a WebDAV server. In Acrobat 9, we also introduced Acrobat.com as a new repository to store and track your review comments. You just need a free Adobe ID to use the hosted service. The back and forth exchange is cut down, feedback is immediate, and efficiency is gained through Shared Reviews used in conjunction with Acrobat’s breadth of commenting tools. One Acrobat customer reported a 50% time savings when switching to Shared Reviews from more manual methods.

With Shared Reviews, reviewers don’t have to work online through a browser to publish or synchronize new comments. Users with Acrobat Pro or Pro Extended can enable free Reader users to easily participate in the review.

In talking with Acrobat customers, people voiced that they want high efficiency and management options in the review process. Initiators wanted tighter control of review deadlines. All of this became more apparent in Acrobat 9 with a streamlined wizard, enforced deadlines, and an improved Tracker to centrally manage all of the reviews you’ve participated in and initiated. For more tips and tricks about setting up or participating in reviews using Acrobat, you’ll want to check out Ali Hanyaloglu’s blog The Same Page. And now that we’re on the same page, give Shared Reviews a whirl in Acrobat 9 and let us know what you think.

Amy Wang, Acrobat Product Manager

Using Acrobat Web Capture you can convert an entire web page, portions of a web page or even an entire site into a PDF document. In Acrobat 9, we have greatly improved Acrobat’s ability to convert web pages into PDF such that it now works very well with the modern web correctly preserving all links and Flash content.

So, why would you need to convert a web page to PDF? For any number of reasons:

1. You want to capture an interesting article that you want to read when you are offline
2. You want to archive information that may change later on with the date and time stamp of when it was captured
3. You want to collect a variety of related information from the web for your research into a single digest
4. You want to send a prototype of a web page you have designed for review

PDF captured from the page:  http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/adobepdf.html
Click on image to see it larger.

We also often heard from customers who wanted to capture just snippets of content from various websites and aggregate them. To make that easier, we have introduced a new Select tool in Acrobat 9 Web Capture. The new tool makes it extremely simple for the user to choose just the content he/she wishes to capture and convert it to PDF leaving out irrelevant material such as banners, advertisements etc.

You can also capture an entire site using Web Capture. Not only do all the links continue to work in the PDF, they also link to local content within the PDF, where applicable, so that you can truly browse the site offline.

Web Capture can be invoked through the Acrobat toolbar in Internet Explorer on Windows and through the Adobe Acrobat 9 application on Windows and Mac platforms. If you would like to understand how to use Web Capture, Rick Borstein has a great video demonstration on his blog here.

Please share any comments or feedback you have – we would love to hear from you on how you have used and found Web Capture useful!

Thank You,

Sanjoy Ghosh, Acrobat Product Manager

Click image to see it larger

In Acrobat 8, we introduced a set of features which allow you to publish your content with more confidence. With Redaction, you can remove visible content (like text or images…or any content) from your PDF that you don’t wish to publish. You can optionally replace that content with blocks or labels indicating that content was removed. And with Examine Document, you can search through your PDF for hidden content (like metadata, comments, file attachments, etc.) and remove those items as well. In Acrobat 9, we improved on both of these features, including the ability to search for and redact entire lists of words/phrases or redact patterns (like social security numbers). Rick Borstein did a great demo of these new features here.  And Donna Baker has a step-by-step tutorial on how to use Acrobat redaction here.

The reason the Acrobat Team has been investing in this area is because there can unfortunately be real business or security consequences when an organization publishes content which reveals more than what is intended. There have been a lot of incidences mentioned in the news, but let me highlight a few of them.

In May 2008, as reported in the Connecticut Law Tribune, General Electric was involved in a class-action lawsuit involving sexual discrimination which sought damages of $500 million. As part of the legal proceedings, GE’s counsel filed paperwork in PDF to the federal court electronic filing system called PACER, with a portion of that paperwork sealed by court order and therefore redacted. However, the information was not properly redacted and the hidden information was revealed by “[copying] the black bars that cover the text on the screen and [pasting] them into a Word document.” [Often times, users mistakenly highlight text in black in Word and then convert that Word file to PDF. However that only covers the text and that text can be later retrieved. I assume that’s what may have occurred in this case.] The result was that information which was “supposed to be sealed by court order, [appeared] with little technical savvy required.” Therefore, the case may be jeopardized due to “revelations that there’s a large leak of information in the case.”

Also in May 2008, as reported on Matt Blaze’s blog, the U.S. Department of Justice released a PDF report detailing wire-tapping and measures the DOJ is taking to make sure that wire-tapping cannot be easily defeated by the bad guys with technical counter-measures. Pieces of the document were marked “REDACTED – FOR PUBLIC RELEASE”. But again, the marks used simply covered the text underneath and as Matt reported the “extra layer can be removed easily with Adobe’s own Acrobat software or by just cutting and pasting text.”  When the marks are removed, they reveal details such as the FBI’s financial arrangements with Verizon regarding wire-tapping as well as a survey of law enforcement agencies on the problems with wiretapping. Matt includes a copy of the original PDF with the bad redaction marks, and you can see for yourself how easy it is to recover this content.

I’ll go back a bit for my third example. In May 2005, as reported in both Government Computer News and Washington Technology, the U.S. military issued a PDF report detailing the accidental shooting death of an Italian journalist by U.S. forces in Iraq, again with portions improperly redacted.  When the improper redaction marks were removed, additional information was revealed, including details of the telecommunications breakdowns which may have been partially responsible for the death.

There are numerous other examples. But the bottom line is that the Acrobat Team wanted to make sure there were effective tools available in Acrobat so that you could publish your content with confidence without concern that sensitive information was still there.

Let us know what you think, and thanks for reading.

Dave Stromfeld, Acrobat Product Manager