Useful and little-known applications of Adobe Acrobat 5.0

Short Description
Adobe Acrobat 5.0 is very useful, yet little known among faculty and students. Among those who do know of it, even use it, many of its applications remain a mystery. This can probably be attributed to the poor Manual that comes, in PDF format, with the product. It is almost impossible to learn from. Below I recommend two third-party books on Acrobat 5.0 that I have found very useful, far better than the Adobe Manual.

Website: www.montclair.edu | Filesize: 135kb
No of Page(s): 6

Content
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1. Acrobat Creates Uniform Electronic Documents.
Many articles, books, and works of literature are available on the Internet for free, and can be assigned in course work. But there’s a problem achieving uniform texts.
Students’ different web browsers, different versions of the same browser, and different default fonts and sizes, mean that web documents longer than even a page or two print out with very different paginations.
Converting the document in question to a PDF file solves this problem. Acrobat produces uniform pagination and appearance regardless of computer settings and even of platform – Windows, Mac, Linux, whatever. Acrobat also paginates, so students can be instructed to “Go to page X”, and every student will have the same page (pagination can also be turned off).
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3. Printing Using Adobe Distiller
When Acrobat 5.0 is installed, it also installs a separate program called ‘Distiller.’ Adobe Distiller acts as a “virtual printer.” You can save files by “printing” them from the Printer menu on your Web browser or other application.
This feature allows for certain kinds of page ‘capture’ that Web Capture cannot do. For example, it permits capturing web pages with non-Latin fonts (e.g. Russian, Arabic). It will also let you capture pages on password-protected sites (e.g. New York Times, Chronicle of Higher Education), where your browser is permitted – because you typed in a login and password – but where the separate connection Web Capture would demand is not permitted (you can’t “log in” using Acrobat, because Acrobat can’t send a login or password to a server).
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