Build with Acrobat

I was on the phone recently with one of our customers. The customer was a mid-sized engineering company in the south central US. The person with whom I was speaking was their director of design automation. The topic of our conversation was their use of Adobe Acrobat, its use within their organization, who uses what features and why, etc. Just by chance we started discussing the actual mechanics of PDF creation, specifically with in AutoCAD, and I mentioned to him that there's lot of good functionality in those Acrobat menus in the top of most applications, as a matter of fact it's the way the Adobe expects its users to interact with Acrobat.

For those not familiar with the menus to which I'm referring... when you install Adobe Acrobat Standard, Adobe Acrobat Professional or Adobe Acrobat Pro Extended, Acrobat will not only be represented on the desktop in the form of a shortcut, but it will also appear as a menu in the UI of most of the applications which are installed on the computer. These menus are called the Adobe PDF Maker Menus and they contain different types of PDF related functionality based on the application where they are found.

The customer with whom I was talking was aware of these menus, however he said that their corporate policy was to disable those menus when installing Acrobat. This is truly unfortunate because his company was in effect paying for a product but removing access to it upon installation. "But they can still print and plot to pdf" was the customer's response... "well yes but it's not that simple" is what I responded.

What I meant was Yes, a user can still create a pdf from most applications by printing the file to a pdf, just as they would print to a printer. The Adobe PDF engine shows up as "Adobe PDF" in the list of printers. However what most people do not know is that the distiller engine that shows up in the printer list is a very basic pdf creation path and is very different from the pdf creation engine that is the target of the Adobe PDF Maker Menus. It's this PDF Maker functionality that you are really paying for when you buy Adobe Acrobat. This PDF Maker rendering engine makes a more accurate and smaller PDF than the File>Print to PDF method. This is particularly evident when you are making a pdf of complex file types like PowerPoint and AutoCAD. These file types contain objects that the Print to PDF path just can't understand and doesn't render particularly well. These differences became clearly evident to me when I ran a series of tests with a customer CAD file a few years back when we released Acrobat Professional 7. Pro 7 was our first release of Acrobat that attempted to directly address the needs of the AEC professional and I wanted to see the capabilities for myself. I took the CAD file and plotted it to pdf as both 24X36 and 11X17, and then took the same file and used the PDF Maker functionality and printing to those same sizes one more time. (The same PDF Maker functionality can also be accessed via buttons on a special Acrobat Toolbar in AutoCAD). The PDF Maker files were not only 75% smaller than the associated Print/Plot to PDF version, but the PDF Maker versions were also higher quality (archs and letters were cleaner), more accurate, (fills, line weights were represented more accurately), and the files has more functionality, (the text was searchable in the PDF Maker version). I'm not sure if my contact had the power to change the corporate standard but its my mission right now to make sure everyone that I talk to is aware of this functionality and doesn't make that same mistake.

The third in my series of free publicly accessible Adobe Acrobat eSeminars will be Tuesday October 19th at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time. This is a great opportunity for folks to quickly learn a few simple high value capabilities of Adobe Acrobat.
I'll also be presenting a second eSeminar on Tuesday, November 3rd, 2009 at 11:00 a.m. Pacific Time. You can register for both eSeminars here.

During this first 30-minute webinar I'll be showing a few simple Adobe Acrobat tips and tricks that will equip you to use Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro Extended more effectively. I will focus on the AEC and EPC features in Acrobat that can help you speed project delivery and boost accuracy of design, engineering, and construction communications. I will also show you how Adobe Acrobat can help you more effectively collaborate on project information during all phases of a project.
In addition, you will learn how to:
• Create PDF files that retain metadata and any layer information from AutoCAD(R) and Microsoft(R) Visio.
• Create PDF "portfolios" that showcase a variety of dynamic content types in a pdf container.
• Share fully interoperable information by issuing PDF files to project team members with full BIM model information and support for IFC (Industry Foundation Classes) Standards.
• Mark-up and review any other file type, with new tools to synchronize views, instantly compare versions, and manage the overall process.
• Include geospatial information and videos in a PDF file.

Although not conferences specifically tailored to the AEC professional, there are two events fast approaching in which Adobe Acrobat will receive top billing.

The first event is the Adobe Acrobat and PDF Central Conference scheduled for September 22-24 in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It's a great way to learn more about how Adobe Acrobat and PDF can solve your most critical business needs.

Several Adobe product specialists like Lisa Croft, Paul Gilbertson and PDF gurus like Ted Padova, Duff Johnson, Angie Okamoto, Bob Connolly, Thom Parker and others will be there to present and meet with Acrobat users itching to learn more.

Details are at http://www.pdfcentralconference.com/

The registration fee for the 2- day conference is $395, however if you become a member of the Acrobat User Community (Free) you will get $100 off the registration. You can't beat that!

So if you like go to: http://www.acrobatusers.com/events/1918/adobe-acrobat-pdf-central-conference to learn more.

The second event is the Adobe MAX conference. Scheduled for Oct 4th though the 7th in Los Angeles California. The conference offers hundreds of sessions and hands-on labs for designers, developers, and anyone interested in learning more about Adobe suite of products.

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

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.