| The comp.text.pdf Frequently Asked Questions | ||
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A: Too many to list here. Adobe's site presently has a ton of material listing all the new tools and features. Here are a few of my favorites. Workflow automation Database connectivity Online collaboration Much improved javascript editor Great new JavaScript objects and interface control Tools for adding PDF structure XML support
Mr T (nert@bobco.com) [A41]
A: We just got our copy of Acrobat 5. First impressions are: 1. If you use forms, you can now use all available fonts, not just the base 13. 2. You can export pdf's to jpeg, tiff, and rtf. The rtf means that you can now create Word documents from PDF documents. We tried it, and the results were OK for text, but poor for anything with complicated formatting, like tables and columns. And non existant for graphics. 3. There are numerous improvements for the colour pre-press market, but we haven't evalutated them yet
Dan Sideen (dansideen@home.com) [A42]
A: 4.05 has Paper Capture. It is an add-on in 5.x. Paper Capture is OCR. Use Acrobat to scan a doc and edit the doc in Acrobat subject to the rule that you must edit text one line at a time. Very useful when making extra copies of documents.
(REMOVEraindoll@ziplip.com) [A43]
A: Adobe have now announced that the Capture plug-in is coming back for v5. It will be a separate download (for v5.00 users anyway) and is slated to be available about June 2001.
Mark Anderson (mark@notmeyeardley.demon.co.uk) [A44]
A: It wasn't worth it a few months ago, especially since Adobe removed the OCR capability. I understand they have since added a patch to put this feature back, but limited it's range. I bought it thinking I could use some of the new "bookmark" features, however I had to go back to ver. 4 since I particularly needed OCR (capture). I have yet to reinstall it, however by now it might be worth part of the price of the "upgrade".
Tore Hanson (hansont@ameritech.net) [A222]
A: I have seen several eps-files, that Acrobat 4 cannot distill but version 5 can. It seems version 5 can correct several font problems which version 4 cannot handle.
Veli Holopainen (veli.holopainen@kaleva.fi) [A223]
Q: Is there any way to cut and paste from a pdf to a word document or to another document in the adobe suite? I want to copy text from a pdf and put it somewhere else, but not as an image. [Q26]
A: First put Acrobat into continuous view mode. That way you can copy more than one page at a time, up to the entire document, but subject to clipboard size limits.
Dave Braze (davebraze@yahoo.com) [A49]
A: Adobe Acrobat 5.0 also has a save as RTF (a format Word can open) option...
Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A50]
A: In acroreader or acrobat just use the text select tool to select your text, copy & paste in the normal way.
Steve Cook (steve.cook@spamulike.bigfoot.com) [A51]
Q: I received in the mail a pdf that when over a page, the hand icon has a down arrow on it and it functions to advance forward through the document when you click. I would like to add this feature to my documents but can find no reference to it in the Acrobat User's Guide. Does anyone know how to add this? [Q27]
A: You can do this in Acrobat by using the article tool. It allows you to guide your readers through the document. It is described in the Acrobat User's Guide from page 247 onwards.
mschulz (mschulz@bigpond.net.au) [A52]
Q: Can anybody tell me if a PDF commandline-tool is available, ie. I would like to execute a line like:
PDFPRINT ACRO.PDF PRINTERXX [COPIES=4] |
resulting in 4 copies of the ARCO.PDF-document on the printer called PRINTERXX [Q28]
A: You can use the Acrobat Reader for printing PDF files via the command line (although xou can't set the number of copies). From the Acrobat Developer FAQ:
"Using Command Lines with Acrobat and Acrobat Reader under Windows
These are unsupported command lines, but have worked for some
developers. There is no documentation for these commands other than
what is listed below. You can display and print a PDF file using
command lines with Acrobat and Acrobat Reader.
AcroRd32.exe filename - Executes the Reader and displays a file.
AcroRd32.exe /p filename - Executes the Reader and prints a file.
AcroRd32.exe /t path printername drivername portname - Initiates
Acrobat Reader, prints a file while suppressing the Acrobat print
dialog box, then terminates Reader.
The four parameters of the /t option evaluate to path, printername,
drivername, and portname (all strings).
printername - The name of your printer.
drivername - Your printer driver's name. Whatever appears in the
Driver Used box when you view your printer's properties.
portname - The printer's port. portname cannot contain any "/"
characters; if it does, output is routed to the default port for that
printer.
If using Acrobat, substitute Acrobat.exe in place of AcroRd32.exe in
the command lines."
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Gunther Schmidt (g.schmidt@bigfoot.de) [A53]
A: It has been reported that the acrord32 /t command line option does not work with Acrobat 5.0 It would appear to be a genuine bug, and Adobe apparently doesn't care, because the command-line switches are officially "undocumented". I went back to Acrobat Reader 4 because the /t switch doesn't work in Acrobat Reader 5. [This asnwer has been edited by mikal@stillhq.com]
Edward Mendelson (edward_mendelson@ziffdavis.INVALID) [A54]
Q: Using Acrobat 4 or 5, or any other program, is it possible to edit an existing PDF file: I need to add 1000 pictures (logos) to 1000 different, existing PDF-files. [Q31]
A: Well, yes, you can edit. One page at a time. You will need patience, or else some product that goes far beyond Acrobat. If using Acrobat, the easiest way to add a logo is to use the Object Touch-up tool, and copy/paste the logo from one PDF (which has it on a blank page, in the right place) to each new page.
Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A57]
Q: Is there a parameter for having acrobat reader search for a specific word? If anybody knows some other parameters, can you post them (or just point me to a page where they are listed)? [Q32]
A: No. The Acrobat Developer FAQ lists some of them, but specifically notes that they are unsupported. I would strongly recommend that they are not used, and a supported method used instead. (If you do choose to use them, please don't complain when they stop working on an upgrade.)
Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A58]
Q: I am working with Acrobat 4.05 and we have purchased Acrobat 5.0 (not the upgrade, the new one). Do I have to uninstall Acrobat 4 before installing 5.0? [Q33]
A: No, you can keep both. But do NOT uninstall 4 later if you don't do it first. Or, if you do, you will have to reinstall 5.
Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A59]
Q: I've just installed Acrobat 4 and now it seems I have 3 different ways to create a PDF from within Word: - Print to the PDF writer - Print to Distiller - Use the "Create Adobe PDF" command on the File menu. How do these differ? Which are the preferred methods in terms of time taken/quality/file size? [Q35]
A: PDFWriter is fast, but not terribly good at graphics. Distiller is general better, but slower. It gives more control to you, and you should spend time understanding its options. Neither will include links, bookmarks etc. Use Create Adobe PDF if you want these features. This will make a larger file of course.
Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A61]
Q: We are producing a cd-rom with lots of pdf´s, all indexed by Adobe Acrobat Catalog. The navigation is done in plain HTML. When viewing pdf´s, it is done by the Acrobat Reader (including the search option) embedded in the web browser. The effect is a Acrobat Reader with reduced menus. Now there is no access to the Adobe Acrobat Seach menu item (edit/search/query), which gives us access to the Catalog build index. Anyone out there who knows about some add-on product, which enable the >catalog index of Acrobat Reader called through an internet browser? [Q36]
A: There is unlikely to be any. Search does not work through a browser; it has no programming interface in Acrobat Reader at all; and the programming interface in Acrobat does not allow the way the result list is handled to be changed.
Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A62]
Q: Suppose I have a PDF document and a keyword I want to search for in the document. I want to create a hypertext link from an HTML document to this PDF document and have it either go to the instance of the keyword or highlight every instance of this keyword. How can I do this? Will this require products other than the free version of acrobat Reader? [Q37]
A: You can read the highlighting file format first
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/acrosdk/docs/highlt.pdf
There are some products which do PDF search and highlight like
http://www.dtsearch2.com
or you can do it yourself by grapping all text from the pdf file and find the position of words.
Dave (davelo@hotmail.com) [A63]
Q: As I understand it a PDF supports both raster and vector images. Is there any way in Acrobat 4 to tell what type an image is? As far as I can tell I can't even select an image in Acrobat and act on it. [Q38]
A: You could use Quite A Box Of Tricks. Even the free demo allows you to click on the page. If it is an image you will get information on the image. If it is text, you will get information on that too. If it is neither, nothing will happen.
Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A64]
Q: Could someone give me some idea what the difference is between using the paper capture feature of acrobat and the full Acrobat Capture software that costs several hundred dollars? I'm using acrobat 4 at present, and the paper capture feature seems to work terribly. [Q112]
A: Capture is designed for high volume, semi-automated use. But take care! Acrobat's OCR is perfectly capable of good results from good originals. If you are getting poor results it may reflect poor quality originals, "difficult" originals (e.g. maths, coloured text on backgrounds, faxes, many others), or a scanning or post-scanning technique that needs improvement (e.g. poor choice of resolution, saving as a JPEG).
Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A161]
Q: I have generated a document using ***insert name of widget*** and I get error messages when viewing it in Adobe Acrobat. The messages are only numbers. How do I find out what they mean? [Q114]
A: Try hitting Ctrl-Ok, which will display a text description of the message for you.
Michael Still (mikal@stillhq.com) [A164]
A: Adobe offers a plugin
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/acrobatreader/win/4.x/plugins/accs405.exe
"The Adobe Acrobat Access Plug-in 4.05 enables vision impaired users to read Adobe PDF documents in Acrobat 4.0x or Acrobat Reader 4.0x. The Access plug-in supplements the standard Acrobat and Reader display of PDF documents with an alternative view that supports screen-reading applications for Microsoft Windows 95, Windows 98, and Windows NT. This view presents the textual content of a PDF file in a separate window. The window contains the text in an approximated reading order. Standard Acrobat features, such as hypertext links, notes, bookmarks, sounds, and movies, are available in the Access view"
And it gives you as option export to html or export to txt. I found it far superior to the export capabilities of Omnipage 11 and it is for free
U Berlin (lwassmann@t-online.de) [A169]
Q: I'm using the Adobe ActiveX from Reader. It has the methods SetPageMode and SetLayoutMode, which are handy. Problem is no documentation as to what values to set the parameters to. I'm sure someone amongst the experts here knows. [Q127]
A: I don't have any documentation, but it's worth mentioning perhaps that there is no documentation for a reason: it is not a developer tool. Adobe created it only to display PDF files in internet explorer, and they don't support any other use. Given that, and that it could stop working as a developer tool with any upgrade, I'd advise people to consider very carefully before starting any development that they have to commit to supporting.
Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A187]
Q: I have a lot of documents generated by LaTeX + Acrobat 4.0. The documents also contains a few pages generated by VISIO.
Acrobat Reader 4.0 can read these documents perfectly without any problem, but Acrobat Reader (AR) 5.0 cannot properly read them.
- AR 5.0 can read only those pages generated by VISIO
- If both AR 4.0 and AR 5.0 are installed on a PC, AR 5.0 can read a PDF perfectly after AR 4.0 read it once.
Is there any backward compatibility option in AR 5.0? (I cannot find!) [Q132]
A: Ah, this sounds like a font embedding/encoding problem. Ther TrueType '.notdef' glyph is usually represented as a rectangle, where the PostScript .notdef is usually a space.
Hmm, yes, looking at the fonts used in your document, I notice that there are fonts like 'CMR12', which are TrueType, and also an embedded subset. These are pretty common Tex fonts.
Indeed, opening the file with Acrobat 4 did work properly. However, if I simply exit Reader, it doesn't make it work with Acrobat 5. I guess you must be saving the file. Maybe the full version of Acrobat 4 does this for you, I don't currently have it installed.
None of the fonts embedded by Tex actually have a /Encoding applied, and I would guess that Acrobat 4 and Acrobat 5 are defaulting to different Encoding schemes. For Tex, 4 works, and 5 doesn't. Consider these font definitions :
116 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /TrueType /Name /F0 /BaseFont /Arial /FirstChar 31 /LastChar 255 /Widths [ 750 278 278 355 556 556 889 667 191 333 333 389 584 278 333 278 278 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 556 278 278 584 584 584 556 1015 667 667 722 722 667 611 778 722 278 500 667 556 833 722 778 667 778 722 667 611 722 667 944 667 667 611 278 278 278 469 556 333 556 556 500 556 556 278 556 556 222 222 500 222 833 556 556 556 556 333 500 278 556 500 722 500 500 500 334 260 334 584 750 556 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 750 ] /Encoding /WinAnsiEncoding /FontDescriptor 117 0 R >> 12 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /TrueType /Name /F2 /BaseFont /AJIANI+CMR12 /FirstChar 31 /LastChar 255 /Widths [ 500 913 272 489 816 489 816 761 272 380 380 489 761 272 326 272 489 489 489 489 489 489 489 489 489 489 489 272 272 272 761 462 462 761 734 693 707 747 666 639 768 734 353 503 761 611 897 734 761 666 761 720 544 707 734 734 1006 734 734 598 272 489 272 489 272 272 489 544 435 544 435 299 489 544 272 299 516 272 816 544 489 544 516 380 386 380 544 516 707 516 516 435 489 979 489 489 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 611 816 761 679 652 734 707 761 707 761 500 500 707 571 544 544 816 816 272 299 489 489 489 489 489 734 435 489 707 761 489 883 992 761 272 489 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 500 ] /FontDescriptor 13 0 R >> |
The Arial definition is embedded by your Visio page, notice that the Tex font 'CMR12' has no /Encoding.....
The possible pre-defined Encodings are :
StandardEncoding
MacRomanEncoding
WinAnsiEncoding
PDFDocEncoding
I've had a quick try at inserting an Encoding for each of these in the file, and I'm afraid it still didn't work, so there may be a more fundamental problem here.
I did run it through a PostScript interpreter, and it printed correctly, which suggests that the default encoding is StandardEncodng, or at least is compatible with it.
My suggestion would be to take this to a Tex newsgroup, and see if anyone there can help you, it may be that updating to a newer version of Tex (or whatever it was you used to convert the Tex document to PDF) will solve your problem.
Ken Sharp (ken@spamcop.net) [A202]
A: Sorry, but this doesn't tell us much. Which TeX System? How did you create the PDF from the TeX or DVI source? Did you use DVIPS? Did you use Distiller? Did you use pdfTeX?
Looking at the file, one notes that it was made by PDFWriter. Strike one. Do not use PDFWriter - always use Distiller.
Then it seems that it has CM fonts in TrueType form. Don't use them. Several versions of these are incorrectly made (for example, marked as "text" fonts so they will be reencoded by Windows). They all show up as empty boxes in Acrobat Reader 5.
The only quality font in there is Adobe's Arial MT. And it is reencoded to Adobe Standard Encoding!
Use quality tools to make PDF. See discussion at http://www.yandy.com/acrobat5.htm for example also http://www.yandy.com/compare.htm
Once you strip out the bad CM fonts you get a PDF file that works just fine. I put it up at http://www.yandy.com/download/intro.pdf (it's also substantially shorter than the file it was derived from).
Take a look (of course, there are still other problems, like unequal rendering of equal width rules, but that is a problem of your TeX System too hard to fix by editing the PDF file).
Louis Vosloo (support@yandy.com) [A204]
Q: I edit a journal and we have recently begun to send manucripts to reviewers as PDF files. A reviewer sent back an extensively annotated PDF file with instructions to send it on to the author. Unfortunately, his annotations all identify him (his name is in the annotation title bar). Thus, we cannot send this marked MS to the authors because the reviewer's anonymity would be lost. I looked through the Acrobat documentation but can't find any obvious way to change the authorship (say, to "Reviewer #2") of the annotations. Is there any way of doing that? [Q140]
A: You could export the comments as an FDF file (File > Export), open the FDF in a text editor and perform a Search & Replace operation, and then import the FDF back into a virgin document.
George Johnson (geojohn@att.net) [A216]
A: Checked out your suggestion. Works very well! What's very dangerous, is I imported the edited *.fdk back into the source file, and it placed the original annotations back on top of the or- ginal ones! For this reason, you're correct in suggesting that the virgin document be used as the destination. Otherwise, the annotated re- ports will include mirrored notations!!!
Happy Go Lucky (haphazzard@earthlink.net) [A217]
Q: I know someone who is attempting to create PDFs using Illustrator 9. When they go into Illustrator and try to save the file directly as a PDF (using Acrobat 4), the images look fine, but the text that she's typed loses some quality (looks a little jagged). [Q149]
A: The same problem occurs with Acrobat 5, and it isn't all rasterization.
Here's what we know so far (there have been a few brief threads on this topic in various newsgroups, including this one, with three or four contributors, total):
If the type in the Illustrator drawing is in front of anything that includes either transparency or certain types of gradients (I've learned there are something like nine different kinds of gradients and they don't all show this effect), Illustrator will convert the type to outlines prior to the Distiller step.
If type has been converted to outlines, either because Illustrator did it on its own, pursuant to the preceding paragraph, or because the user did it for other reasons, all hinting information is naturally lost, and each character is just a filled bezier curve.
Acrobat looks at each node of the curve and makes the pixel in which that node falls type color (black, if your type is black, for example). When the zoom level is small, all those solid black, unaliased pixels make each character look quite jagged. However, as you zoom in, the shapes get smoother and smoother. At a high magnification, the letters look the same as if they were actually type instead of being rendered into outlines.
The upshot is that for printing on a PS printer or sending to a service bureau, most everything works out okay. For printing on a non-PS printer, all bets are off. HOWEVER, it seems that in some cases, parts of a type block do indeed get rasterized. I can't tell you exactly where, but it seems to have to do with the number of layers involved at a given point on the page. So one line of type may begin perfectly normally and halfway along the line turn into a raster image.
Adobe is aware of the problem and it is on their worklist for Acrobat 6.
Dick Margulis (margulis@fiam.net) [A231]
Q: I am interested in knowing what font is being used for a given piece of text in a PDF. How can I do that? [Q156]
A: If you've got the full version of Acrobat, select the text using the TouchUp Text Tool. Then, right-click and select "Attributes". It will show you the name of the font used.
Rachel Burnsed (burnsed@bcl-computers.com) [A239]
Q: It's not so much the loading time that concerns me, it's the slowness of panning and scrolling in an already opened page.
Many of them do contain line art; stuff like mechanical drawings, electrical circuits, etc. [Q159]
A: This leads me to believe you are seeing the exact same problem we observed when moving from 4 to 5.
In our case it was electrical schematics which really highlighted the problem. While I haven't checked version 5 of the full product, I would expect it to behave exactly the same as I assume it shares the same drawing engine. We have stuck with 4.05 as its drawing speed for such line art is snappy - near instantaneous on a 750MHz PIII with a Matrox G400 Max.
Version 5 was terrible. I sent Adobe a sample file (single page A2 schematic, 70Kb size) where, when zoomed in, a redraw was taking about 3 seconds to complete.
I have not checked 5.05.
Dale Rebgetz (Dale.Rebgetz@setec.com.au) [A244]
Q: When I try to copy and paste a table from a pdf document into, say, Word, the contents appear but not in the table format.
Is there any way round this? [Q165]
A: Because PDF files do not contain any information about tables - rows, columns etc. - the best that can be done is guesswork. Acrobat Reader doesn't really try; the full Acrobat in Windows has the Table/Formatted Select tool. But it will never be perfect; PDF is not the medium of choice for distrubuting tabular data for reuse.
Aandi Inston (quite@dial.pipex.com) [A252]
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