Subscribe to podcast
by PodTechWelcome to the Adobe Systems Incorporated podcasting channel powered by PodTech. Adobe is the world's leading provider of software solutions to create, manage and deliver high-impact, reliable digital content. This entertaining and informative series of podcasts which is powered by PodTech.net will include candid conversations with Adobe executives, insight from industry analysts, and the latest information on Adobe's innovative products. For more information on Adobe, visit www.adobe.com
Recent podcasts
Start a Meeting using Acrobat Connect
02/01/2007
Adobe [1] Acrobat 8 Professional's "Acrobat Connect" is based on technology originally created by Macromedia. It's flash-based, which means that anyone invited to attend can get your message using a flash player, even if they don't have the Adobe software. Transcript: Host: Terry White - Adobe Systems Terry White - Adobe Systems Hello and welcome to another episode of Adobe Creative Suite Podcast. My name is Terry White. In this particular episode, we’re going to take a look at Acrobat 8 Professional’s new capability of starting a meeting using Acrobat Connect. Now, for those of who’re saying, “Well, what’s Acrobat Connect? I’ve never heard of this before.” Acrobat Connect is actually a technology based on our acquisition of Macromedia. Macromedia had a product called Breeze and Acrobat Connect has been re-branded or is re-branding of Breeze Technology, which allows you to screen share and conduct online meetings. Now, the cool thing about Acrobat Connect is that it is Flash based. So, while you can start a meeting directly from with an Acrobat, all your participants in the meeting don’t need anything other than a Web browser and over 98% of the computers on the Internet today have Flash Player built-in already. So, you can rest assured just like you can with PDFs; you send a PDF file, most people can read it because most computers have the free Adobe reader. If you start a meeting or invite people to an Acrobat Connect meeting, most people can attend because over 98% of the computers out there have the Flash Player. Now, when I’m in this Acrobat 8 Professional and I’m on the Getting Started with Acrobat 8 Professional welcome screen. If you close this screen you get to it directly from the Help menu at any given time, just by saying Help Getting Started with Acrobat 8 Professional. Now, once you’re here you’ll see a ‘Start Meeting’ button. This button again just takes you right into the Acrobat Connect description, which tells you all about the feature, what you can do. You’re going to get your own personal meeting URL and you can conduct meetings on the fly without any pre-scheduling, without any setup in advance, no software downloads for the participants, again, because they already have the Flash Player. Now, I must forewarn you that Acrobat Connect is a hosted service, meaning you’re not running the server in your own environment. Now, that you can and that will be Acrobat Connect Professional. We have a pricing scheme for that to buy your own server software and install it in your own environment, but for the folks that are going to be doing their own and prompt to meetings, it’s a hosted service and therefore there is an additional fee outside of Acrobat to use the service. The service fee in the US is $39 a month or you can just pay a one-time fee of $395 per year and that way you can use it unlimited up to 15 people per meeting, you can use it 24x7. Again, it is a hosted service. So, you pay the fee and you basically at your own meeting URL that remains static. You can invite people to your meetings at any given time and show them what you’re doing on your computer, doesn’t have to be Acrobat by the way. So, I’m going to go ahead and click the ‘Start Meeting now’ button and when I do that, that will bring up a dialog box asking me to login, if I already have an account. If you don’t, you can even create a trial account and as of the recording of this video it was a 15-day trail account, I’m not sure if that’s been extended. Now, that Acrobat 8, by the time you watch this is shipped, but you can create a trail account for at least 15 days at no cost and try out the service; host your own meetings and see what it’s like. Now, the meeting URL I’m putting in is going to be a little bit different than what you’re going to have because I’m going to use Acrobat Connect Professional, but I’ll show you what features you’ll have in Acrobat Connect. So
Adobe Acrobat 8 Packages: Combine PDFs
30/12/2006
Adobe [1] Acrobat has had the ability to combine separate PDFs into one for some time now. In this episode you will see how not only to combine PDF pages from various documents into one PDF, but also how to package multiple PDFs into a new kind of Package document PDF using Acrobat 8. Transcript: Host: Terry White - Adobe Systems Incorporated Hello and welcome to another episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast. My name is Terry White. In this episode we’re going to take a look at combining files together and for multiple files into a single professional looking PDF file. So, I’m an Acrobat 8 professional, I’m going to getting starting screen; I’m just going to ahead and click Combine Files, once I’m there the Combine Files feature gives me an example or examples of what this will do or benefits of as to why I would want to do it. Let me explain a little bit about combine files in this version of Acrobat compared to previous versions. Previous versions of Acrobat could combine multiple PDFs or pages into a single PDF of multiple pages. This version of Acrobat allows you not only to do that, but it also allows you to make a binder of multiple PDF files into one. So, in other words, the individual PDF file stay intake, but they’re combined into one PDF file that you could send to your clients or customers or colleagues. So, let me go ahead and say Combine Files and it gives me -- it starts to walk me through the process now. The first me it wants me to do is add files, or I could even add folders of different documents that I wanted to combine. So, think of this feature as a way of combining a folder or series of documents that you want to send out, but you don’t want to send out the individual attachments. So, I’m going to grab the various kinds of files that I can include, so they don’t have to be PDF to start off with. In this case I’m grabbing an InDesign file, going to grab a PDF to go with it, here’s a PDF of a newsletter that 16 page., Here’s an EPS file, here’s a JPG, here’s another PDF, here’s another EPS. So, I’m adding those files in, I can move them up or down in their locations. So, for example, if I want to move this file up in the stacking order or below in the stacking order, I’ve buttons that allow me to easily move it up or down. It also shows me the sizes of those files and more importantly I can choose a files size for the conversion. So, I want the smallest file size possible again, because I’m just emailing these up. Now I’m going to go and click the Next button and what this will do is take me to the next area, where I choose between merging the files into a single PDF. So, all of the various PDFs will be one multi page PDF and they��ll be sequentially numbered, or I can assemble the files into, what’s new, is a PDF Package. Packaging the files wrap separate into one PDF Package. So, they stay separate or can be pulled out separately if need be. So, that’s the option I’m going to choose and then we’re just going to go ahead and tell it to also use the first document as the cover page or coversheet. Now normally if you’re sending off a brochure package or package to a prospective client via the mail or Overnight delivery, you’d have a cover letter, you’d have a folder with all your brochures and proposals in it and then you’d send the entire package off as one document. So, think of doing that electronically with this Package feature. So, now I click Create, and what it’s doing now is it’s assembling the package, but remember some of those were native files, like the InDesign files, so it has to convert those into PDF on the fly while it’s doing that. Remember one of those was EPS files, so it’s having to run that through the spiller (ph), and so it’s doing all of the necessary work in the background to convert what wasn’t a PDF already into a PDF, or if it was a PDF downsizing it to the smallest file size, which is what I asked
Acrobat 8: Preflight & Fixup
29/12/2006
Preflighting -- now you can test (and pass or fail) a pdf based on your own selected criteria. And you can fix it easily, too. The functionality in Adobe Acrobat 8 will help with compatability across the variety of Adobe [1] Acrobat Reader versions floating around, and will help to make dealing with pdfs even easier. Transcript: Host: Terry White - Adobe Systems Incorporated Terry White - Adobe Systems Incorporated Hello and welcome to another episode of The Adobe Creative Suite Podcast. My name is Terry White. In this episode, we’re going to take a look at Acrobat 8 Professionals enhanced Preflighting capability. What this means is that in previous versions of Acrobat, you could test a PDF to see if it met certain criteria. In this version of Acrobat, not only can you do a test and pass or fail a PDF based on your criteria, but you can also fix a lot of common things that maybe wrong with the PDF, especially if you’re in print production workflow. So, going to up to my Advanced menu here. I’m going to come down to Print Production, which is where Preflight lives and we can see here that there are several other capabilities inside the Advanced Print Production menu. Some of the ones, which you’re used to in the previous version and you can of course still show the Print Production toolbar, which has all of these commands on it, but I’m just going to go ahead and go to Preflight and we’re going to bring up the Preflight dialogue box here. The Preflight dialogue box has been revamped to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. The Preflight dialogue box has now been separated into various categories of things that you’re maybe looking for. So, for example, if I was just trying to make sure my PDF passed a certain minimum requirement, maybe I’m going to post it on the Website and I’m not sure what version of Acrobat or Adobe Reader people would have. So, what I could do is just say, “Make it compatible with Acrobat 4,” I think that should be a good low comment denominator or even Acrobat 5, I think most people would have at least version4 or 5 today. And of course, I could make it 6 or 7 compatible, but if I stuck with 4 or 5 then I’m pretty much going to cover everybody, that’s got their free reader. Now, you notice that there’re two icons next to this compatible with. There’s the P icon which basically Preflights the PDF to see if it meets that criteria and then there���s a new icon, that looks like a little wrench and what that icon means that, if it doesn’t meet it, it will fix it to meet that criteria. So, that’s what called a fix up inside of Acrobat 8 Professional. It can now not only identify problems because before, all it would do just tell me yes or no this PDF is Acrobat 4 or 5 compatible, but then its up to me to go figure out how to make it compatible. Now, not only it can find the issue if there’s one, but it can fix it up same time. So, there’re various ones for digital printing, for example, there’s a digital printing for black and white and a digital printing for color. So, it’ll fix the PDF to make it applicable for that kind of digital printing. Then there’s also tons of different fix ups here in the fix up category. For example, one of the most common ones and this is the one we’re going to run, is Convert to CMYK Only. If I have a CMYK workflow that doesn’t allow for me to have any RGB or in this case, not even any spot colors, I can say, “Hey you know, I don’t know what the person did who made this PDF, I just know I need it to CMYK, go ahead and take care of it for me.” So, if I say, “Execute,” I’m going get a very important warning. This says, “Once it does this, it’s not possible to revert back or undo the fix up.” So, you should definitely run this on a copy of the PDF just in case, you ran a wrong fix up or didn’t do exactly what you wanted it to do. If you’re familiar with this, you could say, “Don’t show
Acrobat 8 Forms
27/12/2006
Acrobat 8 Professional has new forms capabilities. Forms may not be new, but they are now much easier to deal with. The feature lets the Acrobat do the work of finding common fields and formatting them to save the user time. In this demo from Adobe [1], take a walk through the new tool and see how simple creating form fields in pdfs can be. Transcript: Host: Terry White - Adobe Systems Incorporated Terry White - Adobe Systems Incorporated Hello and welcome to another episode of the Adobe Creative Suite Podcast. In this episode, we are going to take a look at one of the new features inside of Acrobat8 Professional and that is the new Forms capabilities. Now Forms is not new to Acrobat. We’ve been doing Forms now, I believe since Acrobat4 if not 3 and in this version of Acrobat, though it just got a whole lot easier and it got a whole lot more flexible for distributing your forms to people that don’t have the full Acrobat. I have an old form here that I dug up, that I created a while back inside of InDesign and I just exported it out as a PDF. Now here inside of Acrobat though, this is just a static page, I can’t really click in this form to type. I mean the lines are here that basically ask for the information that I’m looking for, the day, the name, the company, city, state, zip, phone numbers, if they are going to pay by credit card that information is down here at the bottom. So we have the ability to put these form fields in one by one which is what I would have done before Acrobat8 but now with Acrobat8, let’s let Acrobat have a crack at figuring out what the Form field should be automatically. Now under the Forms menu, you have a new command that is ‘Run Form Field Recognition’ or RFFR for short. Okay, so we can do the Run Form Field Recognition which will have Acrobat automatically look at the page and say, “Well I think this is a Form Field because it’s got a word next to a line or a word next to a box”. So it kind of guesses that what should be Form Fields and what shouldn’t be and its not going to be a 100% on every single form you bring up and as a matter of fact, I’ve done this form before, I know its not a 100% on this form. So I picked an average example and again this is not a PDF that was created for this Podcast, this PDF is at least two to three years old. So I just wanted to try it on something that I had laying around just to make sure it worked. So here, we are going to run it and it will take a second or two. It’s processing now and it’s basically going to give me a Recognition Report letting me know which fields that it detected and I can go through it page by page, or item by item and figure that out but I’ve got an easier way. I’m just going to close the Recognition Report and just say Highlight Fields, which is a button right here in the upper right hand corner of Acrobat. That will highlight any fields that are on the form in blue. So I can see that its done an excellent job. Not only did it detect 99% of the fields but it also even detected the word ‘Signature’ and put a Signature Box in that someone could click and digitally sign this form which by the way, digital signatures are legal. They were enacted by law, by the Clinton Administration in the US. So they are perfectly legally binding. Now, what about the areas that it didn’t get, I said it got 99% of the form. Well, I can see a period didn’t City, State and Zip, probably because it was confused that the way I designed the form. I designed one line with three names under it. So I didn’t know, probably didn’t know what it should do so I just left that alone. But it got every thing after that work phone, home phone, birth date. It even got the little Check Boxes here next to DSL dial up, other so forth and so on, cable modem. So it did a wonderful job on this particular form but again it didn’t get everything. So how do I fix it now? How do I get the ones that didn’t get? Well that’s
Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional
27/12/2006
A broad look at some of the features in the new Adobe [1] Acrobat 8 Professional and the Creative Suite Premium 2.3 upgrade, which includes Acrobat 8 Professional. [1] http://media.podtech.net/redirects/adobe/
