Acrobat Reader 101
How To Make Acrobat Jump Through Hoops

You Don't Need A Trapeze For Your Acrobat

Adobe Acrobat is becoming the standard for document archiving and distribution. It's easy to use, it's cross-platform compatible, and it's reader is FREE! Here are a few tips on using Acrobat Reader to its full capability for Web-accessible resources. If you're already an Acrobat veteran skip to Puttin' It On Paper for the one thing that most people miss.

Acrobat was developed by Adobe Systems as a solution to problems encountered in sharing documents across systems and across platforms. Acrobat Portable Document Format (PDF) documents can be read by anyone, anywhere, on any system. PDF files will display, and print, exactly as created with all elements sized and positioned as the designer intended. For more information and Adobe propaganda checkout the Adobe PDF Information Page and follow the links from there for more Acrobat information than you will likely ever need.

Admission is FREE

The Acrobat software suite includes everything you need to create and distribute Acrobat documents including live links, bookmarks, forms, sound and video — Adobe would love to sell you a copy. But for reading Web-downloaded Acrobat files all you need is the Acrobat Reader that can be downloaded FREE from the Acrobat Reader Page. The current version of Acrobat (and Reader) is 5.0 and it is available for most languages and platforms. If it's not available for yours, fear not, it soon will be, and for now Acrobat 3.X works just fine anyway. Download and install Reader (the latest version that works for your system) and when faced with an Acrobat file you will be able to, naturally enough, read it. One note — if you have an existing version of Reader, uninstall that one before installing the new version.

Spinning A Web
(or I want my PDF file and I want it Now!)

When you install Acrobat Reader you will also be installing the Acrobat plug-in for your default Web browser. When you click on a hyperlink from a Web page to a PDF file, the file opens in the Browser window neat as you please. You can read the file, print the file, zoom in, zoom out, view page thumbnails, search the text, copy the text and more. The only thing you can't do (in Reader versions earlier that 4.0) if find the file or save it to disc. The Acrobat file goes directly to your cache and the browser's "file - save" feature saves the HTML — but not the PDF. If you want to save the file for future use (and you usually do) the solution is to go to the browser cache and fish for it, or better, go back to the original link and "download" rather than "open." This is done by right clicking on the hyperlink (Windows) or holding the cursor over the link (Mac) and selecting "save target as" (IE) or "save link as" (Netscape). Fortunately, in Reader version 4.0 Adobe has blessed us with a little "save file" icon on the toolbar that allows saves directly from the browser window.

Puttin' It On Paper

One of the great things about Acrobat files is that, using Acrobat Reader, they will print with original formatting and color to just about any printer. In fact, Acrobat files are often used as an intermediary to print PostScript documents to non-PostScript printers. Anyway, let's say you have a very good printer — and you have a great-looking Acrobat file displayed in your Web browser — and you print it to your very good printer — and the printout looks REALLY BAD. What Happened? Simple, while Acrobat Reader prints beautifully, Web browsers do not. You probably used your browser's "file-print" command as you would with an HTML page. To enjoy Reader's printing prowess use the little "printer" icon on the Reader toolbar for printing and stay far, far away from your browser's menu bar print command.

Working Without A Net

Acrobat files not all created equal. In distilling an Acrobat file (yes, distilling is the correct term) the maker of the file has a number of options. Fonts may be included in their entirety or not and graphics may be included with varying resolutions and levels of compression. These factors are juggled in order to get the best balance between image quality and file size. In general, files that are to be downloaded over the Web are optimized for small file size out of concerns for download time. If you zoom in on a photo in an Acrobat file and it is a bit blurry or blocky it is probably because the photo was reduced in resolution and highly compressed to achieve a smaller file size — it's not the fault of either Acrobat or your system.

Finally, there is that Mac/Windows filename/file type thing. Windows uses the last letters of the filename (.pdf) to associate Acrobat with that file type. Macs associate with internal tags and do not require funny filename extensions to know what to do. UNIX machines expect the user to know everything and don't help much in this area. The bottom line here is that you should be able to launch Acrobat Reader and open a PDF file simply by clicking on the filename or icon. But if that doesn't work here's what to do. On a Windows machine make sure the filename ends in ".pdf." If it doesn't, rename the file. On a Mac, you may need to manually launch Reader and use its "file" and "open" commands rather than simply clicking on the icon. If you're running any flavor of UNIX you probably already know what to do (it has been said that UNIX is user friendly — it's just particular about who it's friends are).

The Last Act

Having downloaded and installed Acrobat Reader, found a truly wonderful PDF file, zoomed in, zoomed out, viewed it, saved it, printed it and had a generally swell time there is only one thing left to do.

Turn a summersault and jump for joy.