The Same Page

One of the standout new capabilities for Acrobat 9 and Reader 9 is the ability for up to 3 document viewers to share the view of the page that they have of the document. As Mac|Life magazine said "Running a Shared Review session that’s broadcast with Collaborate Live is an easy and powerful way to get a team working together—not to mention being literally on the same page."

I've already posted an article on using this capability. You can watch a short video on it here. But I have a question for those of you out there in the real world reading this that have Acrobat 9: How do you use the "Send and Collaborate Live" capability?

Here are some suggestions from me on how it can be used:

• Technical drawings and schematics, where someone needs to be guided to a specific point in the document, possible at a very high zoom level
• A sales representative walking a customer through contract or pricing documents over the phone
• Presenting a set of documents to a client or colleague, where the quality of the document needs to be preserved, e.g. high-resolution artwork
• A student walking her teacher or peers through a portfolio or project that she has been working on, explaining each part in detail

How about you? Any other great suggestions? Let us know.

Posted by Ali Hanyaloglu at 3:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Mac|Life magazine recently reviewed Acrobat 9 Pro, giving it a 4 out of 5 (great) rating. You can read the full review here.

The reviewer specifically mentions the collaboration side of things. Quote:

Collaboration gets a big push in Acrobat Pro 9. The Shared Review feature lets you upload PDFs to an internal server or to the new Acrobat.com website and invite reviewers anywhere to make edits and comments in a browser or the latest versions of Acrobat or Adobe Reader. Reviews aren’t real-time—comments and edits must be manually uploaded—but they aren’t bound to a single session. Reviewers can check for new comments and add their own any time they open a PDF marked for review...Running a Shared Review session that’s broadcast with Collaborate Live is an easy and powerful way to get a team working together—not to mention being literally on the same page.

Posted by Ali Hanyaloglu at 4:23 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

That sounds a bit like a paradox, doesn't it? But metaphysics aside, it is a valid question. What if you want to add a custom stamp to a document just for one-time use, without having to configure a custom stamp in Acrobat itself?

Back in March of this year I posted a tip on creating a custom sticky note using the Stamps feature of Acrobat.

But did you know there is an easy way to just add a single occurrence of a stamp to a document? It takes advantage of a powerful technology called - wait for it - copy-and-paste! This tip should work in previous versions of Acrobat too.

Just copy the image you would like to use as a stamp comment, then, um, paste it on to your document from the Edit menu or by pressing Ctrl/Cmd+V. Yes, it is as easy as that. It will create a new stamp comment that you can treat just like any other: resize it, rotate it, and add a pop-up note.

But there's more. If you copy-and-paste text, Acrobat will take that text and create a Text Box comment instead. Depending on where you copied that text from, the formatting may be preserved. Else Acrobat will just use the current default properties for a Text Box.

And if you enable for extended features, those who only have the free Adobe Reader can take advantage of the same tricks.

Posted by Ali Hanyaloglu at 3:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Last week I was lucky enough to give four classes and a keynote (sounds like a movie title to me) at the Acrobat and PDF Central Conference 2008 in Minneapolis, MN. One of the sessions I attended was on Comment and Review Best Practices, which was very well presented by Keith Gilbert of Gibert Consulting. He shared some great tips for marking up documents efficiently which I hope to write about some more. One of the suggestions he had was to make sure that Callout Tool text box should NOT be placed on top of page content as you cannot see what's underneath it.

Doing that is not going to make your fellow reviewers nor the person collecting the comments very happy, particularly if this is part of a Shared Review.

What I suggest you do is either a) use the Cloud tool to highlight an area then double-click to add a pop-note to it or b) change the default properties of the Callout Tool.

One of the properties for the Callout Tool is to set a background/fill color for the text box. Set the fill color to "None" by either right-clicking on the Callout and choosing Properties, or selecting the Callout tool and pressing Cmd/Ctrl+E to open the Properties Bar in Acrobat.

You can set the fill properties or transparency for many of the comments and markup types to help you see what's behind it. And don't forget, you can selectively show and hide comments from the Comments Navigation Panel or from the Comments menu.

Posted by Ali Hanyaloglu at 9:33 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)