Jonathan Bowman’s AEC & EPC Blog

The Acrobat 9 Pro Extended 3D Update is available now, and can be downloaded here.  This update includes a number of bug fixes related to the IFC importer introduced in Acrobat 9.  It also contains several updated dynamic link libraries (DLLs) that provide support for more recent versions of CAD file formats, and fixes a number of bugs related to CAD format import in Acrobat 9 Pro Extended and 3D Reviewer.  This is an optional free downloadable executable.  Have Fun,  Jonathan

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In a previous blog entry I showed how you can take a scanned document and OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the document.  This is turn will allow you to be able to search in the document for words or phrases.  In the AEC industry we heavily rely on scanned documents.  To be able to search across those documents is extremely important when trying to find valuable project information.  I am going to use this blog entry to show you how you can you the Batch Processing feature in Adobe Acrobat to OCR multiple documents at once.

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For those of you in the San Diego, California area you should definitely make plans to attend the Southern California Construction Technology Event this Wednesday 10/29.  It is going to be a great event, and the best part it is FREE.  I will be giving a presentation entitled “The Power of Everyone Being on the Same Page with Adobe Systems” at 4 pm on Stage 1, as well as we will be exhibiting in the exhibit hall.  We should have exciting giveaways as usual, and I look forward to meeting you in person.  For the event details and registration, you can view them here.  Have fun,  Jonathan

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One of the exciting new features in Acrobat Pro Extended is the support of Video inside a pdf document.  This also highlights the flash integration into Acrobat.  Today the industry primarily deals with photographs and in large quantities.   Many times they are taken for risk mitigation or in the case of litigation surrounding projects.  With photographs it is taken in a 2D perspective, meaning that it is at a certain orientation and it does not always give you the best orientation.  In the case of litigation, you often have to document the location, the direction you were facing, and other helpful descriptions surrounding the photograph.  As the world moves to video, it only makes sense that the natural progression for the AEC industry will be to video as well.  I am going to take you through the steps to take a video in a variety of formats and convert it to pdf.  I will also answer the questions as to why you would want to convert it to pdf, when you have so many video players on the market today.

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We made several enhancements to the AutoCAD Batch Processing Features in Acrobat 9 Pro and Pro Extended.  As an industry we work with volumes of drawings and we need the ability to share these with multiple individuals and companies participating on the project.  While Acrobat does not give you the ability to batch process several documents to pdf at once, we do give you this capability for AutoCAD drawings.  This is one of those features that can sometimes be overlooked because the functionality is provided by Adobe but not in Acrobat, but from the Adobe menu in AutoCAD.  In this blog entry I am going to take you through the steps to be able to batch process several drawings at once, but more importantly highlight some of the new features specific to AutoCAD drawings that is only available through the batch processing option.

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