Adobe Acrobat and PDF Tips and Resources

An edited selection of the best Acrobat resources online.

What a huge and wondrous program! It's my favorite out of all the ones in the Creative Suite Premium package. To keep this page down to a reasonable size, I'm focussing on resources for print designers. Since PDF worklfows are such a big part of our lives these days, I've also included resources that deal with creating PDFs from other programs.

Acrobat Tips from DesignGeek e-zine

Best Acrobat and PDF Resources from Adobe's Web Site

Acrobat 7 Tryout
Why isn't there a free tryout for Mac users? A question for the ages. But Windows users can download the free, fully-enabled Windows version of Acrobat 7 from Adobe's site. It's good for 30 days, but the clock doesn't start ticking until you install the file you downloaded.
What's New in Acrobat Pro 7: Acrobat Pro 7 offers a number of cool feature to design professionals. Get your head around what's new and link to other resources from this page.
Download Reader 7: As usual, Adobe's latest version of Reader is free to all takers.
Conduct Client Reviews On-Line with Adobe Acobat 7 (PDF, 652 KB): Impress the heck out of your clients with your uber-geekosity and go through these step-by-step instructions for creating an e-mail based client review of your PDF proofs. If you're working with colleagues on your local network, check out the instructions for using Version Cue CS2 to help conduct a web-based review.
Include Adobe Reader 7 Users in Reviews: Okay, all you want to do is allow your clients who just have Reader (not the full Acrobat program) to add comments to the PDFs you send them? This tutorial will teach you how.

The next four items are some of the most useful documents related to Acrobat from the Print Resource Center page in the Adobe Studio section of Adobe's site (no need to register or log in to get these).

Acrobat 7.0 Printing Guide (PDF, 5M)

This white paper is a must read for creating all types of PDFs. You'll also find information about Adobe PDF settings, preflighting documents, correcting problems in the PDF with Acrobat Pro 7 and communicating print information to customers (or helping your provider communicate them to you!).

PDF/X Files and Adobe Creative Suite 2 (PDF, 1.4M)

What's the difference between PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3? How do you convert a PDF to a PDF/X in Acrobat? Anything special you should keep in mind if you're creating PDFs with Distiller vs. exporting to PDFs from the CS2 programs? Get all the nitty-gritty here.

Transparency in Adobe Applications: A Print Production Guide (PDF, 5.1M)

This 50-page guide is meant for print providers but is fascinating and illuminating reading for anyone who's ever wanted to use transparency features in their projects but were afraid they wouldn't print well. It covers all the technical aspects of maintaining and flattening transparency in Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and Acrobat.

A Designer's Guide to Printing with Transparency (PDF, 6.5M)

A simpler version of the Transparency Print Production Guide above, these 35 pages are aimed smack-dab at the nervous designer. It has lots of pretty pictures (thus the larger file size) and simple language that even an MFA can understand.

Create Adobe PDF Online — First 5 Free!

Don't have a full version of Acrobat but need to quickly create a true distilled PDF? No problem. Adobe's online "Create Adobe PDF" service will take your uploaded file, turn it into a PDF and e-mail it back to you, often within minutes. The first five files are free, after that you can pay as you go or via a subscription. (Since you can create press-ready PDFs from virtually any Microsoft or Adobe product with an export to PDF command, I assume this is mainly for QuarkXPress users.)

Color Workflows for Adobe Creative Suite 2 (PDF 4.6M)

What does it mean, actually, when Adobe says that "Safe CMYK" workflow is the default for CS2 apps? What are you supposed to do with the ICC profiles that Photoshop keeps embedding in your images but your pre-press vendor keeps ignoring? This paper has some well thought-out explanations and answers.

Best Ways to Get Help with Acrobat and PDFs from Other Users

Adobe's Forums: Mac Acrobat | Windows Acrobat: Adobe's best-kept secret is the incredible support users offer other users on their forums. Reading is painless (click "login as guest" button), posting/replying requires free registration.
Planet PDF Forums: The self-proclaimed "home of the PDF community", Planet PDF is a comprehensive, popular indie site that focuses exlusively on Acrobat/PDF users and uses. Planet PDF caters to anyone and everyone interested in PDFs, from professional print/web publishers seeking appropriate tools, to wide-eyed beginngers wondering what "PDF" stands for. Login as a Guest and puruse the Acrobat forums to your heart's content.
PDFZone Discussions (mailing lists): Five different PDF mailing lists are offered. I like these three: "PDF Discussion" is great for intermediate/advanced issues regarding PDFs and Acrobat; "PDF Basics" is a general email discussion for newbies; and "PDF-Forms Discussion" is for PDF form gurus and those on the path to becoming one.

Best Adobe Acrobat Online/Video Training

Lynda.com's Acrobat 7 Pro Training
Lynda.com offers a CD-based or online version of Acrobat training as a series of Quicktime training movies, including a few free sample movies. These cover interface tools and working with links, but a subscription is required for more advanced tutorials.

Total Training's Acrobat 7 Pro Lessons
This 8-hour video training package on 4 CDs is written and presented by Acrobat Acrobat veteran, Tim Plumer. You'll finally learn how to how to use the highligher tool, sticky note and other cool commenting tools. The CDs also include two hours of advanced techniques.
Virtual Training Company's Adobe Acrobat 6 Lessons: My favorite source of on-line Quicktime training tutorials is VTC but they're not keeping up with every CS2 program. (They're up to date with Photoshop, InDesign and QuarkXPress, though.) Still, if you're using Acrobat Pro 6, these are the lessons to take. VTC offers dozens of short, optimized-for-the-web online Quicktime movies, or order all of them on a CD for $99 to get the highest quality Quicktime files. Either way, all sample files used in the lessons are included.

Other Acrobatic Web Pages with Neat Stuff

PDFPlanet's Software Finder: Amazingly there's almost 1,000 products that extend Acrobat's prowess, some of them free. Check it out.

PDFZone.com's PDF Tips & Techniques: Great Design-Geekish tips all about PDFs are posted every couple days or weeks or so. You can also sign up and have them sent to you. (Looks like most of the tips are re-posts of the good forum threads.)

Gary Cosimini's Acrobat Game (PDF, 60K): Many moons ago, as a fun little way to show off Acrobat 3's new Forms functionality, Adobe employee Gary Cosimimi (who is now a major muckety-muck at Adobe) created this interesting little Jeopardy-like game in a 60K PDF. Check out File->Document Properties->Description to see just how old this PDF is.