Acrobat for Legal Professionals

April 20, 2008

Extracting Non-sequential Pages from PDFs

I received this email recently from a paralegal:

My colleague and I have been trying to extract non-sequential pages from a document to create a new document. It appears in the current version of Acrobat Professional (8.1.2) that only sequential documents can be extracted.  Is there a work around for this?  As an example, in a 100 page document we want to extract pages 12, 43 and 97 only.  The ‘extract pages’ option (Document—>Extract Pages) indicates it will extract pages 12-97 which is way more pages than we need.

Yes, it's true that you cannot select and extract a discontinuous range of pages using the Extract Pages option and the Pages Panel.

However, you can drag and drop a non-sequential bunch of pages between two PDFs using the Pages Panel:

You can drag and drop pages from one PDF document to another. That's what this article is about.

Read on for instructions and screen shots. Are you a really visual person? I've also included a movie that shows you how!

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10:00 PM | Permalink

April 15, 2008

Creating a Non-Searchable PDF from Office Documents

Every once in a while, I receive an email that has me scratching my head a bit, such as this one:

When you PDF a document that you generate in MS Word, is there a way to produce an "image-only" PDF, with non-searchable text? The only way I know how is to print out and scan the document back into Acrobat.

Why would someone want to take a perfectly good, fully-searchable document and turn it into an image-only PDF which is just a picture of the page in a PDF wrapper?

The answer is that in the course of vigorously defending a client, some firms desire to make using documents as difficult as possible for the other side.

Of the various PDF flavors , an image-only PDF is . . .

  • 3 to 5 times larger in file size
  • Look worse on screen
  • Print slower
  • Not searchable

"Dumbing down" a PDF to an image probably doesn't cripple the other side very much. Using OCR, the other side can quickly make the document searchable.

It is not without some trepidition that I share this tip. After all, compact, searchable PDF should be what we all aspire to create.

However, since I suspect that many firms are printing out documents and rescanning them, I want to offer a greener alternative.

It's not for me to comment on whether this is fair game or not as you work with the other side, but following is a workaround that will create an image-only, non-searchable PDF from an existing PDF document.

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09:22 AM | Permalink

April 08, 2008

Adobe Legal Forum coming to LA, Sacramento, NYC, Chicago

My colleague Mark Middleton and I will be presenting our 3-hour Adobe Legal Forum presentation in several cities.

All sessions are free to attend and include a buffet breakfast!

Los Angeles, CA
April 15, 2008
Marriott Los Angeles
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Sacamento, CA
April 16, 2008
The Vizcaya Hotel
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Chicago, IL
April 24, 2008
Intercontinental Chicago
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New York City, NY
April 29, 2008
Adobe NY Office
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Registration starts at 9:00 a.m.
Seminar starts at 9:30 a.m.
Seminar ends at 12:30 p.m.
Don't miss events in your city!

Adobe conducts many legal seminars around the US and Canada. Click here to be notified when we're in your your town.


Read on for a full description of these events.

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