You know, I've been using Acrobat--Acrobat Professional, that is--for years and years, and I find it astonishing how little most people know about this powerful app. What makes Acrobat so unique is that it's really hard to define, and it's used in such a huge array of industries. Most think it's just used to view and print PDFs, but there's a whole world of tools, features, and options just waiting to be used to really make your PDFs sing! Best of all, it's really easy stuff. Anyway, so I began compiling some resources on one of my sites as a way to really showcase what this program can do.

First, check out a video series called "Get Goin' With Bookmarks in Acrobat." This series will introduce you to the concept of bookmarks, and you'll see how to create 'em, mange 'em, and best of all, use them to add some eye-popping interactivity to your PDFs. Check it out.

Next up, for a more well rounded look at Acrobat, there's "25 Supa-Killah Acrobat Secrets," a massive list of Acrobat tools and features that'll give ya the gist on all kinds of cool Acrobat commands, including things like audio, video, layers, managing files, print production tools, web tools, and tons more. Check it out.

So there ya go, there's some cool Acrobat resources for you. I hope you like them, and hopefully you'll be able to begin using a few of these tricks right away!

PDF presentations are becoming more and more popular. I guess it's nicer to send one complete PDF file to client that is put in order rather than sending a bunch of individual jpegs.

If you have your jpegs ready there is a very quick and easy way to put them into a PDF file using Photoshop. Open all the files. Select File/ Automate/ PDF Presentation. You will have an option to include all open files on the very top of the window, switch it on.

Now, drag around the files names in the window to put the images in order.

You can select from the options to have a simple multi page document or a slideshow with transition and timing. The latter is great for porfolios, but will only display properly if your client is using Acrobat Reader. Otherwise it will be a simple multi-page document.

In the next dialog window you will have many options. One useful feature is to give a password to protect the document. Unfortunately this feature makes the document lose its thumbs in Preview.

Photoshop CS2 has been out for well over a year, and already people are speculating on CS3 (mostly for Intel compatibility). According to Adobe, it's scheduled to arrive in 2007 Q2, but until then, you can request features on Adobe's website. 2007 Q2 seems a bit unreal when you consider that Apple will be completely on Intel processors by then...

I'm not sure how useful you may find this Adobe Acrobat bit, but I've had a reason to use it recently and thought I would share it.

Say you have a large multi-page PDF document stored on your Web site. And lets say you want to link to a specific page in that PDF file right from your Web page. You could split the specific page out of the file, or you could force your reader to scroll to a specific page, but this is a more elegant solution.

It's really quite simple. First upload a PDF file to your Web server, I'll use a sample PDF called "cb_sample_PDF.pdf" for which I want you to see page 3. Then, in your HTML editor of choice (I like using Adobe GoLive), set the link to the page as follows:

Start with your domain name:
http://www.yourdomain.com

Then add the name of the PDF document:
http://www.yourdomain.com

Now add the page number by using the "#page=" tag:
http://www.yourdomain.com/cb_sample_PDF.pdf #page=3


Of course you must include the standard HTML link tags at the beginning and end, but the end result is a text link on your Web page that looks like this and links to (in the case of our sample) page 3 of the PDF file. Of course the effect of this ability is greater when your visitors have the ability to view PDF files right in their Web browser.