Acrobat for Legal Professionals

April 26, 2007

Custom Security Envelopes

I recently wrote an article on using Security Envelopes to securely send a group of documents to clients.

Security Envelopes can be customized to include your company logo and branding. Essentially, this Acrobat feature is the digital equivalent of pre-printed envelopes.

Customizing the envelope isn’t difficult or necessarily time consuming. Here are the steps involved:

1. Create the envelope template
   I’ve included a sample envelope in Microsoft Word format
2. Convert envelope into PDF
3. Add envelope form fields for To, From, Date, etc.
4. Set Document Properties
5. Save into the Acrobat templates folder

Read on to learn how to make your own customized Acrobat Security Envelope using Adobe Acrobat Professional.

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Safely Send Groups of Files using Acrobat Security Envelopes

When you receive a letter in the mail, most of us assume it hasn’t been tampered with by inspecting the seal or looking for suspicious markings. The outside of the envelope tells us who sent the materials. The envelope itself may contain several documents, but we don’t know which ones until we open the envelope itself.

Unfortunately, in the digital world, securely packaging several documents is more complex.

One possibility is to create a zip archive of the files. Zip archives compress the files, but unfortunately can also contain viruses. Today, many anti-spam programs block zip files. Zip archives also don’t tell us what’s inside and if we should open it. Worse, many clients don't know how to work with Zip files.

An Acrobat Security Envelope is an excellent alternative. A PDF acts as a secure container to send files to your client.

Since Acrobat files can contain attachments, Acrobat can be used as a container for other types of files.

Acrobat 7 offers the ability to create a digital facsimile of an envelope containing other files:

Since the file is an ordinary PDF, all your client needs is the free Adobe Reader to open the file.

Read on to learn how to create a Security Envelope

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April 11, 2007

Fixing Text Reflow Issues when you Copy and Paste Text from PDFs

You’ve just copied some text from a PDF using the selection tool and pasted it into your word processor. Ack! Why doesn’t the text reflow?

Although PDF is primarily intended as an archive format, Acrobat users often want to take passages of text in a PDF and reuse them in a word processor or in email. For example, you may wish to cite part of an important court decision in a brief.

One frustration is that text copied from a PDF may have hard line endings. Depending on how the PDF was created, each line may have a paragraph return at the end.

Text formatted with hard line endings doesn’t reflow properly and can take a lot of time to clean up:

One workaround is to use Acrobat Standard or Professional which can save PDFs to editable formats such as text files, rich text files and Word. In doing so, the hard line endings are generally eliminated.

Acrobat 8 simplifies the process somewhat by offering a new Export button in the Acrobat toolbar:

However, this workflow means saving out the file, finding the correct passage in the Word file, then copying that to your working document. That’s a lot work if you just want to copy a paragraph or two!

Fortunately, there is an easy way to eliminate hard line endings when copying text from a PDF.

Read on to learn how…

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