Adobe Acrobat Mysteries

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ACROBAT is the kind of program you can't live without. But then you can't seem to live with it either. To most of us, Acrobat is a mystery. Acrobat files don't look or act like anything we've ever seen. They are sort of like text files and sort of like image files. I hope this column will help unravel some of the mysteries. Adobe, long an innovator in graphics, type, and Postscript printing, has over the years developed and popularized the file format. Pdf stands for Portable Document Format and is the of choice for sharing documents of all sizes from computer to computer and over the Internet. One beauty of the .pdf is that you can view and print files exactly the way they are supposed to be viewed and printed on any computer platform - Mac, Windows, Unix, and recently even Palm OS. It doesn't matter if you have the font used in the original document; .pdf files will still print as intended. A second benefit of the .pdf is that, when created with a little finesse, the files are substantially smaller than the original word- processing, graphics, or spreadsheet files used to make the .pdf file. There is even a built-in table of contents feature that Adobe labels bookmarks. Most people don't know it, but Acrobat is so powerful that you can create elaborate interactive, multimedia documents with hypertext links from and to words, images, spreadsheet tables, videos, and so on. That's the good news. Now for the bad news. It would seem logical that, since .pdf files contain text, you could open a .pdf document with a word processor, but generally you cannot. In most ways, a .pdf file is more like a picture of a page than a real page. If you open a .pdf file in Adobe Illustrator, you find a large graphic file in which every word is a single graphic element. Until recently, if you wanted to decompose a .pdf file into text or graphics files, you had to deal with a third- party developer and purchase a plug-in for Acrobat that cost between $100 and $300. In reality, no matter how Adobe packages Acrobat, it is really several programs, not just one. And this leads to more confusion. Now I want to discuss some practical ways to deal with .pdf files and then briefly discuss creating a bookmarked .pdf file from various word- processing files. Acrobat Reader is a free download from Adobe and a necessary companion for your Web browser. If you are able to view and read Acrobat (.pdf) files, you already have Acrobat Reader. If not, then you need it. The most recent version of the Reader is 5.0, and it comes with a new feature, the ability to search for text in a document. I recommend you take the time to download this new version. Adobe's servers are pathetically slow, though, and it's a huge file to download, so try to do it on an off-peak time - like maybe 2 a.m. Assuming that you don't want to purchase the full version of Acrobat from Adobe - more on this later - about the only way to convert a .pdf file into a word-processing file is to print the file and use OCR (optical character recognition) software, such as OmniPage or TextBridge, to scan the document. Since .pdf files print so nicely, OCR software handles them well. Incidentally, on a Mac, Acrobat Reader 3 did not print long documents well, so upgrading to at least version 4 is important. Like many programs, Acrobat can be given added functionality by installing various plug-ins. If you have an older version 4 of Acrobat (the full program), you can purchase third-party plug-ins that will convert Acrobat files (.pdf) into .rtf or rich text format files that are usable by just about any word processor. I've had good luck with a $159 plug-in called Gemini (www.iceni.com). The program did a nearly flawless job of converting from .pdf to .rtf, but I have mostly used it with files that were primarily text. If you are interested in learning more about Acrobat and the plug-ins for it, visit either the Adobe website or one of the following sites: www. …