September 2008 Archives

We are receiving great feedback on all the AutoCAD enhancements we made in Acrobat 9 Pro and Pro Extended in converting drawings to pdf.  One of the areas we focused on was usability, and taking some of the tasks and reducing the cycle time to complete those tasks.  Time is money in our business and we want to aid you whenever we can.  Several of you are unaware of how to use the AutoCAD functionality so I want to use this blog entry to walk you through some of the new enhancements specific to the PDF Maker button.

Back by popular demand we are going to host another Acrobat 9 AEC eSeminar showing off all the new features specific to the Architectural, Engineering and Construction Industry.  The first eSeminar was held during the summer when most of you were on vacation, so now here is your chance to see Acrobat 9 in action again.  I will be covering new and advanced features such as new 2D AutoCAD options, PDF Portfolios, Drawing Comparison, Forms, Web Collaboration, Video, GIS and IFC 3D Model conversion.  This is an opportunity for you to see a lot of the new features, and what Acrobat 9 has to offer.  You can register for the event here.  Hope to see you there!  Have fun, Jonathan.

In the AEC Industry we often receive documents that have been scanned.  A lot of times though, the user who originally scanned the document did not either have the ability or take the time to OCR (Optical Character Recognition) the document.  Why is OCR important?  Well if the original creator did not OCR the document you essentially have a nice picture, but no intelligence to the document.  If you wanted to search for a word in the document, it would not find any results even though you can see the word exists.  This is especially important when you have a large volume of documents and you need the ability to search across those documents for a key word or phrase.  Most people do not know that Adobe Acrobat gives you the ability to OCR a document.  I am going to use this blog entry to take your through the steps of how to OCR a document starting with an unintelligent scanned image.

Adobe won two Gold Constructech Vision Awards.  “The awards are to honor companies that have realized the advantages of applying innovative technologies to their everyday businesses as well as the technology enables that have helped them achieve their goals”.  Adobe Systems won Gold with M.J. Harris, Inc. for Builder/GC Commercial and Gold with Cornerstone Home Builders Inc for Builder/GC Residential.  For the Builder/GC Residential award we shared the honor with Argos Systems and CG Visions, both of whom provide great technology solutions for the AEC industry.  So how was your summer?  I thought I would share some of the Adobe highlights from this summer just in case you missed it while you were on vacation.