My colleague Mark Middleton and I will share tips, tricks, and more!

We look forward to meeting you!

An agenda and schedue is available in the full article on my blog.

With Acrobat 9 Pro, you can Bates number all of the files in a PDF Portfolio in a single step, even converting common Office formats automatically along the way. Keeping all the files in a PDF Portfolio is convenient and makes it easy to deliver and maintain the document set.

In this article, I'll discuss how you can Bates number across a Portfolio, and also discuss a few limitations.

Acrobat 9 was announced today! The new version will ship sometime in the next month or so. Here's a link to the Acrobat 9 Press Release.

Acrobat 9 includes many new features of interest to legal professionals!

• Enhanced Redaction and Bates Numbering
• File splitting
• Better Save to Word with flowing text
• PDF Portfolios (Packages on steroids!)
• More powerful Document Comparison

You can check out demo movies I've made of the major new features . . . read on to learn more.

One thing that blew me away is that Acrobat 9 is F-A-S-T! It launches in one-third the time of previous versions and generally feels a lot snappier in use.

All versions of Acrobat can now play Flash content natively. You can embed Flash movies (SWF and FLV) files and play them right in Acrobat. That means you can embed deposition and audio interviews and know that the recipient can play them with confidence.

Adobe is also be launching a new service called Acrobat.com.

Acrobat.com is a collection of free hosted services that you can use to work with people inside and outside your organization,
across geographies and firewalls.

Acrobat 9 users can work with Acrobat.com as a central location for certain document processes such as Shared Review, Form Data Collection and more.

Acrobat.com also offers two amazing, free features:

• 5GB of hosted storage
• Free 3-person web conferencing so you can share your screen, show documents, present and even show your face on your webcam

See and learn about all the new stuff! Read on . . .

While PDF is superior in many ways, TIFF remains a popular format for use in large case litigation support systems such as Concordance and Summation.

If you have a lot of PDFs in your production it can be a challenge to work with these systems as they do not robustly support PDF and conversion is necessary. These systems want to ingest a . . .

• TIFF file to represent each individual document page
• TEXT file of the text of each page

Processing several hundred documents to individual TEXT and TIFF files is a candidate for some serious automation!

Fortunately, repetitive tasks like this can be easily accomplished using Acrobat Professional. Since Acrobat can be automated using JavaScript, it is possible to string together several steps and save a lot of time.

In this article, I've included a Tiff-Text Processing Batch Script to download which handles all of this conversion automatically. Here are the results:

One of my bosses always told us that our customers are smarter than we are.

I was reminded of this recently when I received this note from James Strupp of the Federal Office of the Public Defender:

A far easier and more direct way to do this, in my view, is to create a new PDF from "multiple files", even if you are just extracting pages from one file.

Doh! That's a great idea! Jame even sent along his detailed instructions. I've added some screen captures and additional detail of my own.

Read on to learn about this alternate method to extract pages.

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:

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

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.

non-searchable PDF,locked down PDF,crippled PDF

Is it possible to add a bookmark that can point to any place in any document in a PDF package? We use bookmarks extensively in our large document files (one of the reasons I liked the print bookmark workaround you came up with), which makes it easier to navigate a lot of information.

The short is answer is Yes!

In this article, I'll discuss how you can create links from the PDF Package Cover Sheet to any document in the package.

This technique offers you a central place where you are a click away from any important passage in any document in the package.

Using this technique, you can quickly get to the document locations which describe the key characters, issues and facts in your case.

PDF Case Analysis,Acrobat Case Analysis

I've written previously regarding how . . .

1. Acrobat can help you winnow down the large number of documents in a case using full-text search.
2. An essential list of documents may be further managed and annotated in a PDF package.

In this article, I'll discuss ways in which you can code and capture your thinking about your case in a PDF Package.

Specifically, you'll learn:

• How to create custom Header Fields
• How to fill in and use PDF Header fields to code documents, like a spreadsheet

PDF Packages,Case Analysis,Case Management

I recently received this email message from an attorney:

I use the Stamp tool to affix a graphic of my signature to pleadings before e-filing them or sharing them with other counsel.  But recipients who fail to choose to print with "Document and Markups" produce a doc that lacks my signature.  So, I've taken to flattening them by printing to my PDF driver, but that produces a doc of embarassingly poor quality.

Some Background

Acrobat offers the ability to print documents with or without comments. If you choose File—>Print, you will see the following option:

If you had a heavily commented document with lots of highlights, you may wish to print a clean copy by choosing the "Document" option.

Once you select an option here, the setting is sticky for the next time you print from Acrobat.

Unfortunately, signature stamps are also a type of annotation. If your client or colleague has recently chosen the "Document" option, the important agreement you worked on won't have your signature.

Fortunately, there are some good workarounds:

1. Flatten the document so that Stamps and Annotations become part of the document layer
2. Embed your signature as an image, rather than a stamp
3. Add a special "Print with Comments" button to your document.

In this article, I'll discuss these three workarounds. Read on to learn about them.

Acrobat Comments,PDF Comments,Printing Acrobat Comments,Flattening PDF,Flattening Comments

Since PDF has become the de facto eFiling format and a paper replacement, use of Adobe Acrobat is nearly ubiquitous across law firms.

It is advantageous to know as much as you can about new software that will arrive in the months ahead. With that knowledge, you can plan your budget, anticipate training needs and investigate how the new product will fit into your existing infrastructure.

What new features will be in the next version of Acrobat?

I can't tell you here, but you may be able to find out yourself by signing up for Adobe's Pre-release Program.

Read on for more information about Adobe's Pre-release Program.

The eSeminar was Today's Communication Challenges. In this eSeminar, my colleague Jim Merry and I offered a high-level overview and demonstration of what Acrobat can do for Knowledge Workers.

Knowledge Workers work in many disciplines, but have several common tasks that they need to accomplish:

• Document Preparation Presentation, and Sharing
• Protecting Sensitive Information
• Electronic Forms and Data Collection
• Electronic Document Review & Approval

The slides include many helpful resources including links to tutorials, books and more.

Read on to get to the download materials.

Since documents are a key aspect of the argument, presentations may need to include large thumbnails of key pages from the case— often from PDF files.

Several methods may be used to take turn a PDF page into an image which can then be placed into PowerPoint or other applications:

1. Export the PDF as a TIFF, JPEG or other image format
2. Use a screen shot utility to "grab" a portion of the screen.
3. Print the PDF to a TIFF file
4. Use the PDF as an OLE object

I find that the methods above are multi-step and cumbersome.

In this article, I'll show you how the Snapshot Tool can place a page thumbnail into PowerPoint in one simple step!

Read on to learn how to use the Snapshot Tool.

PDF redaction,pdf clean-up

I recently received this message from a legal technology consultant:

I have had several clients (and have wondered myself) why there’s no way to delete something from a PDF. For example, if I scan a document and want to delete the black marks made by the staple holes in the top left corner, I can’t do that without cropping the entire image.  What is the reasoning for not including a feature that would allow me to draw a box around those staple holes and delete them from the image? 

Actually, Adobe did include a feature to clean up scanned images!

You can easily clean up scanned images using the Redaction tool:

Normally, redactions appear as a black box which obscures the underlying document. Did you know that Acrobat can redact to "No Color" as well?

In this article, I'll offer step-by-step instructions for cleaning up scanned PDFs using the Redaction tool in Acrobat 8 Professional.

Using this workflow, you can easily delete staple marks, hole punches, shadows, dirt and more from PDFs.

Read on to learn how…

Acrobat Legal Links List. Acrobat Legal Resources

Mark Middleton— Adobe's Legal Account Specialist— maintains a list of legal-related links for Adobe Acrobat.

This "cherry picked" list has some great resources which you should check out.

Go to Mark's Legal Link List

You can also read on for a description of the list and a picture of my esteemed colleague!