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.

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.

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.

To batch OCR multiple documents, you will need to navigate to the Advanced Editing Menu – Document Processing – Batch Processing as shown below.

The Batch Sequences window will open and you will want to choose “New Sequence” as shown below.

Adobe Acrobat will then ask you for a Sequence Name.  In this case I am going to call it Batch OCR and click OK.

The next screen will allow you to setup the process.  This is where you will define the action you want to take, batch OCR in this case, the document or folders you want to run it on, and the desired output location.  The first step is you will choose “Select Commands” from this window.

From the Edit Sequence window you will choose “Recognize Text Using OCR” which is about half way down the list and click Add.  In this same window you can select the process and edit any of the OCR settings you choose and click ok.

This will take you back to the Main Edit Batch Sequence Screen.  From this screen you will now need to choose first what you want to run OCR on.  As you can see from the drop down you have several options to choose from.  I like to setup a folder that contains the documents that I want to run OCR on.

Once you select what you want to run OCR on then you need to select the Output options.  Again, I like to setup a folder where the output will be saved.

Your last option in this menu is to select your Output Options.  I can change the Naming of the files and also set the Output Format.

Once you have made the appropriate setting then simply click OK which will take you back to the Batch Sequences Menu.  You will now see your new sequence in this menu.

Simply select the Batch OCR sequence and click on Run Sequence and OK and this will start the Batch OCR Process.  Once the process has completed you can then navigate to the output location and find the documents that you have run Optical Character Recognition on.

This is a great feature and by using the Batch Processing option it should save you a lot of time.  Take the time to look at the other Batch Processing options as you may find other processes that will be beneficial to your current work process. 

Have Fun,

Jonathan

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

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.

The question that I get asked the most when describing this feature is why would you convert the video to pdf?  The first is that you will be able to leverage the FREE Adobe Reader and distribute it to whomever you see fit and the recipient will be able to properly view the video and have the software to be able to do so.  More importantly you have all of your Acrobat functionality available to you once it is in pdf.  You will be able to review and comment directly on the video, you will be able to combine the video with other supporting documentation, and you will have all the security in being able to protect the video in the pdf document.  One of the use cases I heard recently was the use of video with job site reports.  Now you can submit the job site report along with the video that supports it.

Let’s take a look at how you can convert a video to pdf.  The easiest way to do this is simply open up Acrobat and open the folder in which the video is stored.  Then just simply drag and drop the video into the open Acrobat window.

Note:  Video formats supported are:  ASF, ASX, AVI, 3GPP, MOV, MP4, MPEG, MPG, QT, and WMV files

Once you have done this, the conversion screen will appear.  The first thing that I like to do is set the Poster Image.  This will be the first frame that is show in the resulting pdf file.  It does not always have to be the first frame of the video.  You can use the slider bars to scrub through the video the find the poster image that you want to use and then simply select set poster image from current frame.  The other option you have here is the scrub the video down.  You do not have to use the entire video.  You can use the slider bars on the left hand side to only show the portion of the video you want to use in the resulting pdf.  If you click on advanced, it will give you further options to set the Launch Settings, Quality, Controls and Video options. 

Once you have clicked okay the conversion process will start, and the result will be a flv file stored inside the pdf document as shown below.  If you click the play button in the bottom right corner the video will begin to play.  In your Advanced Options you could have set the video to play when the document is opened. 

Now for the fun stuff.  Where I see this being used the most is not necessarily just viewing the video, but the ability to use all of your other Acrobat functionality.  The first thing I want to show you is the ability to review and comment directly on the video.  All you have to do is turn on your review and commenting toolbar and then play the video and stop the video where you would like to make a comment.  Then just choose your preferred commenting tool and place the comment directly on the video.  I will show you a couple of screen shots where I commented on the video.

The great part about making the comments on the video is that it time stamps it and it also stores the comments like other pdf comments in the comments tab.  You can click on a comment in the comments tab and it will take you directly to that point in the video in which the comment was made for ease of navigation.

Also as I said before I can now combine this video with a job site report, or any other form that is required.  I can also use all of my other Acrobat functionality.

As the world moves to video, it just seems like a natural progression that the AEC industry will as well.  This is just another example of how Acrobat can be used to increase productivity surrounding your projects.

Have fun,

Jonathan

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.

The first step is to simply locate the Adobe PDF menu that was installed in your AutoCAD toolbar automatically when you installed Acrobat as shown here.

This will open the Batch Processing screen to which you can now add a single drawing or multiple drawings.  Now you may be asking yourself why you would load a single drawing versus several and the answer is because this feature gives you some advanced capabilities that are not provided in the PDF Maker conversion of a dwg to pdf.  The following is a screen shot of the Batch Processing screen.

The first step I typically take is to load the drawings that I want to convert.  This can be done by selecting the Add Folder or Add Files under the DWG List section as shown here.

Once you have added the files you want to convert the next step is to specify whether you want to include All Layers or No Layers in the resulting pdf as highlighted here.

You can also choose the conversion settings menu which will allow you to change additional settings such as whether to include or exclude the scale.  Also if you notice in this screen it is writing the pdf output to the PDF/E specification which is now and ISO Standard as shown here.

Once you have chosen the appropriate conversion settings, the next settings which are new for Acrobat 9, is the ability to control the Page Size and the Plot Styles.  This functionality is only provided in the Batch Processing screen in AutoCAD and not through the PDF Maker.  This feature can be used for one drawing or several drawings, and is a great enhancement to Acrobat 9.  You now have the option of taking the defaults from what was setup in AutoCAD or adjusting the output to your specification as shown here.

The next section in the Batch Processing screen, and new for Acrobat 9, is the ability to select the Output PDF Options.  This is where you can control whether you want a pdf for each drawing or layout and whether you want to package the drawings together in a PDF Portfolio for distribution.  It also gives you the option of where you want to output the pdf files to.  This can be the same directory or one in which you choose.

Last but not least, new for Acrobat 9 is the ability to Exclude or Include the model space for all the drawings that are being processed.  This prevents you from individually having to select each file and deselect the model space if you do not want to include.  When processing several drawings this could be a huge time saver.

Batch Processing AutoCAD drawings is one of those features that may get overlooked but is very valuable to you when dealing with large amounts of drawings.  The new settings in Acrobat 9 should help to increase the usability and improve the efficiency in which you create pdf documents. 

Have Fun,

Jonathan

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.

By using the PDF Maker button it allows you to preserve both layouts and layers associated with the drawing, and choose which ones you want to convert to pdf.  This started in Acrobat 7 and has continued into Acrobat 9. 

The process you would take to complete this task is first select the PDF Maker button in the AutoCAD toolbar.

The following screen will come up and you can choose the layouts you want to include in the pdf output.

The next screen asks you whether you want to retain or flatten layers.  In this case I will choose to retain the layers.

I can then pick and choose which layers that I want to retain and also create layer sets.

Then you click OK and the pdf file is created with both layouts and layers preserved.

So what is the enhancement?  Well you may have noticed that you had to go through three screens each time you wanted to generate a pdf.  The new feature for Acrobat 9 is that you can set the defaults for the layouts, layers and model space so that you do not have to go through these three screens to generate a pdf file. To access this feature in AutoCAD go to the Adobe PDF Menu and select Change Conversion settings.

Once you have selected the menu the following dialogue box will come up and at the bottom of the box you can set your default options for layouts, model space and layers.

Then the next time you choose the PDF Maker button you will just simply type in the name you want to save the file as and the conversion process will begin.

Next week I will cover the new Batch Processing Options in how you can now control page size, plot styles, and model space.  Stay tuned for that blog entry.

Have fun,

Jonathan

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.

What cracks me up when I go out and meet with AEC companies is when I start to discuss how they handle scanned images; I am usually met with the response of “well we use TIFF because it is a better format”!  My follow up response is, “do you know who owns the specification to the TIFF file format”?  Yes, that is correct Adobe owns the TIFF specification.  Okay, enough of the history lesson, let’s take a look at how you can start with a scanned image and make it an intelligent document.

The first step is to simply locate the scanned image and then convert it to pdf.  Now there are several ways to do this, such as File - Create PDF – From File, right click on document and choose convert to PDF, or just simple drag and drop the file or files into an open Acrobat window.  If you drag multiple files it will give you the option of combining all of them together into a single document.  By converting the document to PDF you have not OCR’d the document, so it is still just an image.  As you can see from the image below, I have searched for the word “Ozone” and no matches were found even though you can clearly see the word Ozone in the document.

To OCR the document you simply select from the top tool menu Document – OCR Text Recognition – Recognize Text Using OCR which will bring up the following dialogue box.

You can click on the Edit button and make any changes to the settings that you need to.  For a detailed explanation of each setting you can visit the Help section to determine which one is best for you.  For the most part you can start with the defaults that are given.

Simply click OK and the OCR process will begin.  It will go through and recognize the text on the document as well as cleanup and deskew the image.  Now if you perform the same search for the word “Ozone” it will find all the instances of Ozone in the document.

While the OCR engine is very accurate, the engine may have trouble with some text or with poorly scanned documents.  As a check, you can choose Document – OCR Text Recognition – Find First OCR Suspect.  This will produce all the words that the OCR engine had trouble with and you can either confirm or correct the words.

Sometimes you start with a document that has been OCR’d but it still needs work.  A good tip & trick to use with these types of documents is the Document – Optimize – Scanned PDF functionality.  A customer I was with not too long ago wanted to just simply deskew the document, and this is the feature that they used to make the correction.

This is one of those “wow” features that a lot of people do not even know exists in Acrobat.  Scanned images are a staple though in the AEC industry and this is a great feature in taking what is a very dumb document and actually giving it intelligence!

Have fun,

Jonathan

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.

We released the much anticipated Acrobat 9!  The feedback from Acrobat 9 has just been overwhelming from those of you who have had the chance to either try or buy it.  It has many new exciting features that are focused at the AEC industry.  There are hundreds of new feature and really too many to list.  For the AEC industry though we had several AutoCAD enhancements, Portfolios, Flash Integration, Form Enhancements, Document/Drawing Comparison, 3D IFC Support, Geospatial and many more. 

This summer we also put on an eSeminar series with our partner McGraw Hill.  If you would like to learn more about any of the features I listed above you can visit our McGraw Hill Page and view the recorded on-demand sessions.  It is always a tough challenge in the summer to compete with summer vacations and so forth, but now is your chance to catch up.

We have a conferences coming up that I will be attending and presenting at.  These include the AGC Technology Conference and the Primavera User Conference.  Both of which should be very exciting events.  The AGC Technology Conference will be held in San Diego and the Primavera Conference will be held in Las Vegas.  If you are in the area or plan on attending please stop by and say hello.

I know the blog has been on life support this summer.  It will get revived and I will start sharing a lot of the new features in Acrobat 9 and how it solves many of the industry pain points that we face today. 

Have fun,

Jonathan

For this blog entry I want to take you through the steps of comparing two drawings and showing you how this feature works.  The first step is to simply open Acrobat 9 and choose from the top menu Document - Compare Documents.  The following screen will launch and you will pick the two revisions you want to compare.

Once I have chosen the two revisions that I want to compare and the document type I simply click OK and the process will start.  For drawings it is analyzing vector data so it my take a little more time than a text document, but not much.  Once the process is completed it will let you know in the summary if any changes have been found.  The easiest way to navigate to the changes is to simply zoom in to a percentage of about 50% and then open up the comments tab as shown in the screen below.

If you click on the comments in the comments tab it will take you directly to each change that has been made.  Then if you click directly on the comment it will show you the changes between the two.

When you think about your current process and the time and effort involved in tracking changes between revisions, you can easily see why the McGraw Hill Interoperability number was at 46% for time lost to document version checking.  This is a great new feature for Acrobat 9 with the expansion of the types of documents and the detail the document comparison provides. 

Have fun,

Jonathan

All you need access to is the IFC file.  You do not have to have the native 3D CAD application installed on your computer.  Just simply open Acrobat Pro Extended and drag and drop the IFC file into the open window.  This will convert your model to pdf.

I can then zoom into an object and select that object and turn on my Model Tree (File - Navigation Panels - Model Tree).  The result is now I can see all the IFC information associated to that particular object as shown below.

It is as simple as that.  The value of Acrobat Pro Extended is that it goes much further though than just visualization.  A lot of people want to compare us to current 3D viewers on the market.  The value is that I am now leveraging 89% of desktops as anyone with the Free Adobe Reader can also view, navigate and see the IFC information.  I can also use other Acrobat functionality with the 3D model such as being able to combine this model with other documents, review and comment, collaborate, etc. 

Again, I think this is a great feature and support the BIM initiative in being able to share this data across organizations.  We will have eSeminars coming up where will demonstrate this feature and go into further details. 

Have fun,

Jonathan

We are well into a successful launch of Acrobat 9.  Many of the features address many of the AEC industry pain points.  For this launch, we have partnered with McGraw Hill to bring you several of the events.  This gives you a perspective as to what the leading industry experts are saying, as well as the functionality to address many of these issues.  If you missed the Acrobat 9 for the AEC industry launch eSeminar you can view the on demand presentation and demonstration here.  We also have several deep dive seminars that are coming up in the next few weeks.  These will be 30 min sessions that will focus on specific functionality.  Continue reading for a complete list of dates to upcoming events and other helpful links.

The 30 minute deep dive eSeminar series is as follows:

July 29th – “Share Your Ideas”

• creating pdf’s that accurately communicate design intent
• delivering documents from a variety of sources as a package

July 31st – “Work Better Together”

• electronic document review and approval
• live collaboration and document sharing
• document revision comparison

August 14th – “Controlling Your Work and Making Forms”

• protecting your sensitive information
• collecting, processing, and analyzing critical data

August 26th – “Advanced AEC Features”

• 3D models and IFC BIM support
• video collaboration
• geospatial features

You can register for one or all the events by clicking here.

As part of the launch we will also have a page on ENR.com listing all the upcoming events and helpful information for Adobe products in the AEC industry.  The page is currently under construction, but you can bookmark it for future reference.  The website address will be http://www.enr.com/adobe. 

For Acrobat 9, several of the Business Development Managers will be posting podcasts to a new site called Acrobat Podcast.  This site will focus on several industry segments (MFG, Life Sciences, Legal, AEC and more) and will offer helpful tricks and tips in very short segments.  The site url is simply http://www.acrobatpodcast.com. 

If you have not clicked on enough links by now, I am going to give you one final link.  As part of the launch I shot a video highlighting Acrobat 9 for the AEC industry.  So if you feel like making a comment on my performance I will enjoy those as well.

Have fun,

Jonathan