25 September 2009 Eric Rasmusen, erasmuse@indiana.edu This file is now at http://www.rasmusen.org/a/acrobat-rasmusen.txt These notes are Acrobat pdf tips and tricks that I have found useful or thought might be useful. I wrote these for my own use and have not tried to make them clear for others, but some other people might like them. ********************************************************** To CROP: Don't use the Crop item in DOCUMENT, which is the obvious way. Instead, go to TOOLS then ADVANCED TOOLS and then CROP BOX and you can make a box around what you want to keep and double click inside it to crop it. ********************************************************** PDF: Foxit Reader has a button that can be placed that when clicked makes a docuemnt 100% size. Also, it easily allows the dumb navigation pane to be permanently suppressed. And it allows full customizatio of the tool bar. I think it might be quicker to open , too. and it is less bloated. And when I process inLatex, I can process and produce a new PDF even while the old one is open. I then need to close it in Foxit and reopen it to see th enew one, though-- there is no RELOAD command. And it has tabs for multpe documentsin one window. And it has RESTORE LAST VIEW SETTINGS WHEN OPENING, as a Preferences option. ********************************************************** MICROSOFT WORD and LATEX and PDF Acrobat 9 pro will convert PDF to WORD, so I can do everything in latex and convert later. ********************************************************** NAVIGATION PANE and ZOOM: GETTING RID OF THE USELESS BOOKMARKS and ZOOMING SENSIBLY. The navigation pane is the stupid large panel on the left that takes up so much space. There is no way to turn that off by default. You can, however, turn it off for any individual document by choosing FILE- Properties-Initial View and then resetting Navigation Pane and Magnification. Not setting a sensible default or allowing the default to be changed is a huge Adobe error. My respect for them has dropped. There is no way to change the default zoom. There is indeed an have zero effect. The document writer has absolute control over the default zoom for readers. See my complaints and a command-line workaround at: http://forums.adobe.com/message/2090064#2090064 ********************************************************** I have both the full Acrobat 5.0 on my computer and the free Ac 8.1 reader. The free reader is the default. To get Acr 5.0, I need to go to processes via CTRL-ALT-DELETE, shut down the acroreader.exe, and then click on my Acr 5.0 icon to open it up. ********************************************************** To install Ac 8.1 as the default and the plug-in for Mozilla Firefox, I need to first put xxx in front of the directoyr name for Acf 5.0, then go to CONTROL PANEL and remove Ac 5.0, andthen install Ac 8.1. ********************************************************** 16 PAGES TO A PAGE PRINTING To do this, do PRINT, the PROPERTIES, then PAGES PER SHEET and set it to up to 16. ********************************************************** CUTTING AND PASTING TEXT If you find you cannot cut and paste text to other applications, change the pdf file's security settings from STANDARD to NO SECURITY. ********************************************************** INSERTING PDF INTO HTML This method didn't really work for me-- the width wouldn't work. BUt here it is, for reference. **********************************************************