Acrobat for Legal Professionals | The Acrolaw Blog is a resource for lawyers, law firms, paralegals, legal IT pros and anyone interested in the use of Acrobat in the legal community. Rick Borstein, blog author, is a Principal Solutions Consultant with Adobe Systems Incorporated.

What do legal professionals need to know about Adobe Acrobat DC?

Posted on April 30, 2015 by Rick Borstein | Comments (2)

Those of you who follow my blog are no doubt saying, “Gosh, Rick, aren’t you a bit late to the game here?” After all, Adobe Acrobat DC shipped three weeks ago.

I am negligent, although on advice of counsel I will not actually admit that . . . 🙂

In this post, I’ll present just the essentials of the Acrobat DC. I hope to follow up with more detailed posts in the future.

Adobe Acrobat DC Essentials for Legal Professionals

Adobe Acrobat DC is the latest version of Acrobat and is the successor to Acrobat XI
The “DC” stands for Document Cloud, a set of (optional) connected cloud services for Acrobat
The PDF file format has not changed.
Any work you produce with Acrobat DC can be opened in previous versions or other tools which work with PDF
The new version includes about 40 new features and a redesigned interface
You can buy Adobe Acrobat DC via subscription (paid monthly or annually) or perpetually (purchase outright).
I plan to blog more on this topic, so stay tuned.
New Adobe Acrobat DC Mobile app

What are the Document Cloud services?

Many attorneys are already using cloud services. You may wonder what your ethical obligations are when using cloud services. I suggest you consult the Practice Management section of your local bar association for advice. Some US states have issued opinions and the American Bar Association offers this useful web page which aggregates this information: Cloud Ethics Opinions Around the U.S.

For many of our legal customers, the idea of cloud services is new, but I must say that the services available with Adobe Acrobat DC are really useful and work very well. I think you will enjoy using them in your practice.

Below, I’ve included brief descriptions of the services which I think are most valuable for legal professionals.

Electronic Signatures

With Acrobat DC, you can collect legal e-signatures quickly and securely — without printing, faxing, overnight delivery or requiring your client to come to your office. This eliminates paper and saves time. More importantly, it removes friction from signature processes and keeps the workflow completely digital. Recipients sign documents in any web browser on any device (PC, Mac, tablet or phone). All parties receive a certified, tamper-evident PDF with a full audit trail.

Learn more about Electronic Signatures included with Adobe Acrobat DC

Send and Track

Send and Track allows you to send large files to clients and colleagues. You can easily track the progress of your sent files from anywhere and you will be notified by email when a file is viewed. Send and Track is integrated into Acrobat DC, but you can also access it from your web browser or use the Outlook add-in (Win only) to easily send links to large attachments.

Learn more about Send and Track included with Adobe Acrobat DC

Mobile Link

Mobile Link allows you to access recent PDF files you have opened from any device. This feature transparently makes any PDF you’ve opened available in any Acrobat client (desktop or mobile). It even opens the file to the exact same page! You no longer have to email a document to yourself or explicitly save a document in a designated folder. I have to say this feature works incredibly well and I use it daily.

Learn more about Mobile Link included with Acrobat DC

What new features are included in Adobe Acrobat DC?

Acrobat DC includes 41 new or enhanced features. Consult this table which compares to Adobe Acrobat DC to Acrobat XI

I plan to blog in more detail about some of the features in the future.

In case files are missing . . .

Posted on February 3, 2015 by Rick Borstein | Comments (2)

A request for my blog readers . . .

If you find a post with a missing file, please let me know.

The best way to do so is to a Post a Comment to the article. Please include the URL when you do and a description of the issue.

Thanks!

Rick

Creating a PDF at the Right Output Size and Dimensions

Posted on February 2, 2015 by Rick Borstein | Comments (0)

Most of us are familiar with typical document sizes such as letter (8.5″ by 11″), legal (8.5″ by 14″) and ledger/tabloid (11″ by 17″).

A recent email I received made me realize that not everyone knows how to actually format their documents to match:

I have the attached document that I need to output at 14 inches wide by 14 inches high. When I print to PDF, there is not a choice for this. I’ve attached the Word file so you can take a look . . .

When I opened the document, I realized that the document was set to Letter size in landscape orientation (11″ by 8.5″). I was able to work with the customer to find a solution, so I thought I would share it here.

Setting the Page Size in Microsoft Office

If you are using an Office application, such as Word, Excel or PowerPoint, you should create and edit your document at the desired print dimensions. That way, your editing process will reflect the physical page size.

When you change the page size in Word, the layout will adjust automatically and text will reflow.

Here’s how to change the page size of a document in Word. This is for Office 2013, but 2007 and 2010 versions are substantially identical.

Go to the Page Layout Ribbon in Word
Click the Size button
Choose More Page Sizes at the bottom
Enter your desired page size and click OK
Click the Acrobat ribbon in Word
Click Create PDF

Checking the Page Size in Acrobat

Acrobat will convert the document to the exact page size specified in Word.

Here’s how to check. With the file open . . .

File> Properties
Click the Description tab
The PDF Page size is listed:

Using the PDF Printer and Preserving Page Size

Maintaining page size is tricker when printing via the AdobePDF printer. For example, when I created a 5.25 X 7.25 custom page size and printed to the PDF printer, the output looked like this:

It is possible to maintain the PDF page size by creating a custom page size for the PDF Printer. Here’s how . . .

Create your document in the tool of your choice and make note of the page size
Choose File>Print
Select the AdobePDF Printer
Click the Settings option for the Adobe PDF Printer
Note: The labeling and position of this option will vary depending upon the application used
In the Adobe PDF Document Properties window, click the Add button . . .
Give the new page size a name
Set the dimensions of the new page size and click Add/Modigy
Choose the new page size from the Adobe PDF Page Size menu and click OK.
Print the document. The results should match the page size:

Note: Word and other applications may complain about margins and paper size when you go to print.. You can ignore these issues.

In my testing, the page size setting wasn’t “sticky”, at least in Word. That’s probably a good thing since I think most of us create standard letter-size and other documents.

Dial a Phone from a PDF Link on Mobile Devices

Posted on January 7, 2015 by Rick Borstein | Comments (7)

Clients and customers often review PDFs on their mobile phones. Perhaps you’ve sent an Intake Agreement to your client which they open on their iPhone or Android device. Your client then has a question and they want to call you.

Your phone number appears on the PDF you sent, but your client needs to know how to copy it, then paste it into the dialer application on their phone. That’s a hassle. Wouldn’t it be great if they could simply click the phone number in the PDF and dial the phone?

Yep, that’s possible! This capability is also very useful to add to your marketing brochures. Why not make it easy for potential clients to contact you?

Add a Phone Dialer Link to a PDF

You can add a special URL to a link so that it will dial the phone. Here’s how to add a “Dial the Phone” URL in Acrobat.

Open a PDF document
A) Choose the Selection tool
B) Highlight a phone number
With the phone number highlighted, right-click and choose “Create Link”:
The Create Link window opens.
A) Set the Link Action to”Open a Web Page”
B: Click the Next button
Enter the phone number you wish to dial in the following format: tel:3125558888
NOTE: Do not add any spaces or dashes.
A) Enter phone number into URL field
B) Click OK
Save the document.

What happens on the mobile device?

When your client or customer clicks on the phone number, it will open the dialer application on the phone:

I’ve tested this on Adobe Reader Mobile on both Android and iOS, but other PDF viewers may also support this.

If the recipient opens the PDF on a desktop or tablet device, the link will be ignored.

23 Free Review Stamps for Acrobat

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Rick Borstein | Comments (8)

Acrobat includes a plethora of review tools, but most are not very eye catching. You want your edits to get noticed, right?

Today, I’m sharing a set of 23 stamps that I have designed. These stamps help you call attention to your edits with colorful iconography:

Stamps included in the file

I created the stamps using Adobe Illustrator, so each stamp is a tiny, vector file that scales and prints well. The text has been converted to outlines, so adding a stamp from the supplied file does not embed fonts in your document.

Download the Stamps File

Review Stamps.pdf

Right-click the link above and choose Save As or Save Target As to download the file to your desktop.

The Stamps file is a PDF, but it has some special properties. You must install the file for it to work as a stamp.

IOW, just opening the file won’t do you any good!

Install the Stamp File

Follow these steps to install the Stamps file.

Note that you will need to be an admin on your computer to install the file.

Quit Acrobat XI if it is already open.
Copy the Review Stamps.pdf file to the User Stamps folder:
- WIN 7 or WIN8
  C:\Users\USERNAME\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\Acrobat\11.0\Stamps
  MAC OSX
- /Macintosh HD/Users/USERNAME/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Acrobat/11.0/Stamps/

The folders might be hidden . . .

These folder locations may be hidden on your computer, so don’t freak out if you don’t see them at first.

Here are some tips for finding them:

WIN: Open an Explorer window and paste the path into it. Change the USERNAME to your user name and hit enter.
MAC: Open your Home folder, then go to the View menu and choose Show View Options. Check Show Library Folder.

On the Mac, you will need to show your Library folder

Another way to find the Stamps folder

An alternate way to find your stamps folder is to have Acrobat tell you where it is located. You can do this from the JavaScript debugger. Here’s how:

Hit CTRL-J (Win) or CMD-J (Mac)
Enter app.getPath(“user”, “stamps”);
Hit CTRL-ENTER (Win) or CMD-Enter (Mac) to see the stamps path

Use the JavaScript debugger to find the stamps folder

Using the Stamps

This part is easy!

Open the Comment pane
Click the Stamp tool
Choose the Review Stamps category
Choose the stamp to place on the document

A few tips for using Stamps

Add a Note to your Stamp

After adding the stamp, double-click it to add a note:

Double-click the note to add a sticky note to it.

Keep the tool selected

This option will keep the Stamp tool selected, but you will need to select the individual stamp needed.

To keep the Stamp tool selected, right-click on it and choose Keep Tool Selected:

Sizing Stamps

Stamps may be sized. Just click and drag to size as you apply them. Or, select the stamp later and drag the handles to scale it.

Stamps may be rotated. After applying the stamp, find the rotation point and drag to rotate the stamp:

List View for Stamps

If you don’t like the gigantic list of stamps with preview, choose “Show Stamp Names” from the Stamp menu to use a slim, text only list:

Choose this option to see a text-only list of stamps

Add the Stamp Tool as a Quick Tool

Quick Tools appear at the top of the document window. Add the Stamps tool so that you don’t need to open the Comments pane.

Right-click on the Stamp tool and choose Add to Quick Tools:

Deleting or Changing the Order of the Stamps

You can re-order or delete stamps in the file.

Open the Review Stamps.pdf file in Acrobat from the your Stamps folder (see above).

Open the Pages panel in Acrobat. Note that the first page is blank. DO NOT DELETE the First page.

To Delete a stamp, select the thumbnail, right-click, and choose Delete Page

To re-0rder the stamps, drag the thumbnail of the page to a new location.

Use the Pages Panel to delete or re-order the stamps file.

Need to know more about working with Stamps?

Visit the Acrobat Help page:

http://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/adding-stamp-pdf.html

List Form Fields with this Acrobat XI Pro Action

Posted on August 28, 2014 by Rick Borstein | Comments (0)

Jonathan Schreiber, a very smart colleague of mine who specializes in Adobe EchoSign, asked me if it was possible to list all of the form fields in a PDF. Jonathan was developing an application to map the Acrobat form fields to a custom API for EchoSign.

If you don’t understand what any of that means, don’t worry about it. If you develop PDF forms, it can be useful to have an inventory of all of the fields. That can help you check for errors and better understand tabbing order and naming.

Oddly, although the Forms panel in Acrobat shows a list of them, there is no way to export the list.

So, I cooked up an Acrobat Action which uses a custom JavaScript to write all of the field names, in order, to the JavaScript console:

You can select the text in the Console and copy it into another application or (top tip!) choose Create PDF from Clipboard in Acrobat to create a new PDF listing your fields.

Installing the Action

Download the List Form Fields Action here
Unzip the file
Rename the action to List Form Fields.sequ
Double-click the .SEQU file to import to Acrobat.

Some Set-Up

Most folks should be able to use the Action to write the form fields list to the JavaScript Console. However, it wouldn’t hurt to make sure that your JavaScript settings are set correctly so that it works.

Choose Edit>Preferences and select the JavaScript category. On the Mac, choose the Application menu, then Preferences.

Make sure your JavaScript Prefs look like this:

Using the Action

Here’s how to use the List Form Fields action:

Open a PDF with form fields
Open the Tools pane then open the Actions section
Locate the List Form Fields action and click on it
Click the Start button

A few Notes about the Action

The Action works on both AcroForms (traditional Acrobat forms) as well as LiveCycle Designer (XML-based) forms.

If your organization deploys Acrobat with JavaScript turned off and locked, you will not be able to run this Action. If your JavaScript preferences are grayed out, that is likely the case.

Speed up PDF Search with an Embedded Index

Posted on July 29, 2014 by Rick Borstein | Comments (0)

I recently received this query from a customer:

I have assembled over 4000 pages of case data into a single PDF. When I choose Search (CTRL-F) and search for a keyword, it can take a while time to find a word. Is there any way to speed up the search?

Heck yeah! Acrobat Pro allows you to embed a full-text index in a document which greatly accelerates search. The index travels with the document (it’s embedded, duh!). An embedded index speeds up search ten to twenty times.

In this article, I’ll show you how to embed an index in a PDF. You can literally do this in a minute or two!

Note: Acrobat Pro can also create a cross-document index. I’ve written about this before.

Embedding an Index in a PDF

Open the PDF in which you want to embed the index. If the PDF is a scanned document, you should OCR it first.
Open the Tools Pane and click on the Document Processing section:
NOTE: If you don’t see a Document Processing section, click the flyout menu to make the section visible:
In the Document Processing section, choose Manage Embedded Index
The Build window opens. Click the Embed Index button.
Depending on the size of your document, building the index may take a few seconds to a minute or two. Generally, Acrobat indexes very fast.

With that simple change, even the largest PDFs can be searched super-fast.

If you add to your PDF over time, simply update the Embedded Index following the steps above.

Two Kinds of Search

Acrobat offers two variants of search.

FIND allows you to find the next or previous instance of search term. You can get to Find by typing CTRL/CMD-F:

ADVANCED SEARCH returns a search results lists which includes a snippet of the text in context. This is one of the best ways to quickly spot a search term. Advanced Search also includes a number of advanced search features such boolean operators (AND, NOT, OR) and many other remarkable features.

How to use Advanced Search in Acrobat

The best way to get the benefit of faster search with an embedded index is to use Acrobat Advanced Search option.

To get to Advanced Search, choose Edit> Advanced Search or type CTRL-ALT-F on Windows or CMD-OPT-F on the Mac.

In the Advanced Search window, simply type in the word or phrase you are looking for and hit the Search button.

Acrobat will return a contextual hit list of words. Below, I searched for the term “preflight” and found 254 instances in the document.

Adding a Circle Stamp in Acrobat or Reader

Posted on July 14, 2014 by Rick Borstein | Comments (2)

I hate filling out paper forms! Not only is my handwriting terrible, but the whole print/scan/send routine is time consuming.

Fortunately, both Adobe Acrobat and Reader have the hand Sign pane which let’s you add text, add checkmarks and sign a document:

While these tools are great, they don’t cover all of the use cases for typical paper forms, for example one like this:

On a paper form, you’d simply circle either Yes or No, but that is missing from the Sign pane in Acrobat. Fortunately, you can easily include a Circle Stamp. The procedure below works in either Adobe Reader XI or Acrobat.

Download the Stamps

Both Reader XI and Acrobat can use existing PDF files as stamps. While Acrobat can convert virtually any artwork to PDF, Reader cannot. To help out, I’ve included three Circle Stamps below (Red, Blue, Black) which you can import and use. Download these to your computer and follow the steps below.

red_circle_stamp (9k PDF)

black_circle_stamp (9k PDF)

blue_circle_stamp (9k PDF)

These small PDFs each are small circles with a diameter of 12 points.

Creating the Custom Stamp

Follow these steps to import that stamp

Choose Comment Pane > Annotations > Stamps
Click Stamps Tool and choose the flyout menu> Create Custom Stamp:
Click Import, and select the stamp file you downloaded from my example above.
Choose a category from the menu or type a new category name (such as My Circle Stamps), name the custom stamp (e.g. Blue Circle), and then click OK.

Apply a stamp

Once you have created the stamp, you can apply it to your document.

Click the Stamp tool. The most recently used stamp is selected.
In the Stamps Palette, choose a category from the menu, and then select a stamp.
Click the document page where you want to place the stamp, or drag a rectangle to define the size and placement of the stamp.

NOTE: If you haven’t provided a name in the Identity preferences, the Identity Setup dialog box prompts you to do so.

Below, I’ve applied the stamp.

Change a stamp’s location or appearance

I purposefully made the stamps included with this article small. When you apply the stamp, you can click and drag to scale it or do os later.

Below are the general instructions for using stamps. Using the Select tool or the Hand tool, you can do any of the following with the stamp selected:

To move a stamp, drag it to a new location.
To resize a stamp, click it, and then drag a corner handle.
To rotate a stamp, click it, move the pointer over the handle at the top of the stamp, and drag when the rotate stamp icon appears.
To delete a stamp, right-click the stamp and choose Delete.
To change the stamp’s opacity or the color of its pop-up note, right-click the stamp, and choose Properties. In the Appearance tab, set the opacity or color.

Creating a “Favorite” Stamp

If you regularly use a Stamp, you can add it to your favorites. It will then appear at the top of the stamp list.

Using the Select tool or the Hand tool, select a stamp markup on the page.
In the Annotations panel, click the Stamp tool and choose Add Current Stamp To Favorites.

Repeatedly using the Same Stamp

Sometimes, you may want to use the circle stamp repeatedly. Use this trick to avoid having to reselect the tool

Right-click on the Stamp Tool and choose “Keep Tool Selected”:

Hosting a Shared Review: An Alternative to Acrobat.com

Posted on May 8, 2014 by Rick Borstein | Comments (7)

An Acrobat Shared Review allows multiple people, in real time, to add notes and comments on a PDF. In order to do so, you need a server or shared resources such as SharePoint or a network folder. Both of these are great solutions for behind the firewall reviews.

To see a short video of how Shared Review works, click here.

Occasionally, you may need to have an open review with multiple participants or collaborate with others across multiple domains. For these open reviews, many of our customers used our Acrobat.com service which made the process simple.

In January 2014, we announced that Workspaces on Acrobat.com will be retired in January 2015. That means that Acrobat.com will longer be an option for hosting Shared Reviews. Fortunately, Acrobat supports the WebDav protocol, so that is a great replacement for open reviews which were the forte of Acrobat.com.

I recently purchased a yearly subscription to an inexpensive webdav service from SqueakSoft webdav service. No particular reason, but that came up first in Google and it is only $6 per year.

You can, of course, use webdav on other hosting providers and cloud services.

Here’s how to get started with the SqueakSoft service and getting it working in Acrobat.

Purchase SqueakSoft

Go to SqueakSoft webdav service, then click on the Order Now link.

In the next screen, enter your desired WebDav username.

Add the service to your cart and complete the transaction. You will be asked to create an account to manage access to the WebDav service and you will also need to create a password for your WebDav service.

It might take a few minutes or more for the service to be activated.

Configuring Acrobat to use the WebDav Service

Open a PDF you want to review in Acrobat
Open the Comments pane, then Send for Shared Review
From the menu, choose: Automatically collect comments on my own internal server
Click the Next button
In the next screen: Choose Web server folder
Type in: http://webdavhost.net/YOURWEBDAVUSERNAME/
(replace the all caps text above with the username you created on the SqueakSoft service)You will be prompted for your WebDav username (name you chose in the Cart screen above) and WebDav password.
Click the Next button
Click the Next button TWICE
Name the Server Location anything you want, e.g.: SqueakSoft Open WebDav
Click the Next button
Fill in the email address for the reviewer(s)
Click the Send button
This will send the Review-enabled PDF via your default email client to reviewers.

What happens on the server?

Acrobat will create a small review folder on the WebDav server which allows all clients to sync comments to it:

Note, in the workflow above, I am suggesting that you email the document to your recipient rather than upload it to the WebDav server. This way, the WebDav server is only used to store the comments, not the document itself. SqueakSoft offers a huge amount bandwidth for a very small amount of money. If you are only using the service to sync the comments (my recommendation), then you would have enough space to conduct many thousands and thousand of reviews.

Each comment is saved as an obfuscated XML file. Anyone who would try to view the comments in a web browser by typing in http://webdavhost.net/YOURWEBDAVUSERNAME/ would be prompted for a log-in.

What is the Shared Review experience like for the recipient?

As part of the process above, the review PDF is emailed to your recipient.

When they open the PDF, they will see a message like this:

The recipient clicks the Connect button, and then is presented some information about the review such as the Review Deadline, review team, etc.:

The document will open and your recipient can and respond to comments made by everyone on the team.

A status bar at the top allows users to publish and retrieve comments which are synchronized to the PDF document in real time:

How do I find out more about Shared Review?

Here’s two QuickStart Guides. Enjoy!

Comment in a PDF file with Adobe® Acrobat® XI
adobe-acrobat-xi-comment-in-a-pdf-file-tutorial_ue

Send a PDF file for shared review with Adobe® Acrobat® XI
adobe-acrobat-xi-send-pdf-for-shared-review-tutorial-ue

How to Erase and Clean-up a Scanned PDF in Acrobat XI

Posted on January 7, 2014 by Rick Borstein | Comments (2)

I recently received this email from one of my blog readers:

Does Adobe Acrobat have a feature similar to the eraser in the old MS Paint program to edit pdf documents? The feature does exist in ScanSoft Paperport (I have version 11). It is very useful to remove stray marks on scanned images, staple marks, fax headers, punched hole marks, etc. If used with extreme zoom, I can remove just about any marks on the page so it looks like new. However, it would be useful to have all the features in one program. I prefer to use Adobe Acrobat to OCR, and otherwise manage PDF documents, but if they need editing I am forced to use ScanSoft Paperport. Also, the file size seems to go way up after I edit the document with Paperport.

There are two ways you can clean up content in a PDF:

Use the Redaction tools (Acrobat Pro only) and redact using the "No Color" option.
See my Redaction Guide for instructions.
Use the Edit Image option and an external editor to clean up the PDF

I’ve never written about the second option previously, so this seems like a good opportunity to do so!

Using an external image editor makes the most sense for image-based PDFs. However, Acrobat can also call a program to edit vector content, too.

The Acrolaw Blog is a resource for lawyers, law firms, paralegals, legal IT pros and anyone interested in the use of Acrobat in the legal community. Rick Borstein, blog author, is a Principal Solutions Consultant with Adobe Systems Incorporated.