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The Measuring Tools in Acrobat 8 Professional

 

Hello again, well, things have been going well, Acrobat 8 has launched and I'll be hitting the road soon to bring you the new cool features of Acrobat 8 Professional and Acrobat 8 3D. I was asked recently that someone needed to do some measuring to make a couple of changes, so in this edition I want to discuss a little known or less used feature for Acrobat for AEC: The Measuring Tools!

Ok, let’s take a step back; did you know that if you publish a 2D PDF, using the PDF creation button inside of AutoCAD or the PDF command inside of Bentley MicroStation, that Acrobat will maintain viewport scale!!!  Also, if you have multiple viewports Acrobat understands and associates each viewport with its scale, very cool!  So let’s take a look at the Measure tools from 2 perspectives; one from a PDF that is created with AutoCAD 2006 (and in a later post) another PDF I got from a website.

 

PDF from AutoCAD 2006

 

Here I have a Dim Layout from a Crate and Barrel Store, it is a single viewport and I will use the PDF creation button that Acrobat 8 Professional (note you will only get a PDF creator in AutoCAD with Acrobat 8 Professional or 3D) has installed in the AutoCAD interface;

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Also note the viewport scale is ¼” = 1’-0” or a ratio of .0208.  Now let’s select the PDF creation button from the Acrobat tool bar and create a PDF.  I selected to get only the paper space sheet, and I kept all layers.  I now get a PDF that is has 100% fidelity, and has kept the layer info and all scale info

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Now I get a PDF that looks like this.

 

I want to zoom to an area of interest and do some measurements and do a quick area calculation.  

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Ok let’s get the measure tool bar up; go to Tools|Measuring|Show Measuring Toolbar

 

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So now I just select the measure tool and you will see a dialogue pop up

 

Before selecting PDF

After selecting PDF

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Now just add a couple of distance measurements, (here I used the layer control in Acrobat 8 Professional to turn off all the drawing dimensions for a clearer view) the dimensions here are shown in inches.  

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Now select the Area tool and just drag around an area as I have shown here.

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Notice that the area here is shown is Square Inches, I can set it to be Square Feet or Meters, or Centimeters or almost any thing.  There quite a few setting you can set to enhance your measurement experience, if you go to Edit|Preferences then got to measuring (2D) you can set to your liking; the help system has a really good description on this.

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Ok that’s enough for now, have fun and give this a try.  I will be adding another side of the measure tool later this week.  Stay tuned!

Come see us on the web at http://www.adobe.com/aec

 

Acrobat for AEC Blog

Posted by on January 15, 2007 4:52 PM |

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