Acrobat tip: Set Page Display in PDF files

Have you ever won­dered how to make your PDF files open in a par­tic­u­lar page dis­play lay­out? Sent a PDF of a book­let or mag­a­zine to some­one and won­dered how to make the title appear on its own page?

The “Ini­tial View” set­ting in Adobe Acro­bat is the answer. Sim­ply open Doc­u­ment Prop­er­ties (Ctrl+D on Win­dows, or ⌘+D in OS X) and click onto the “Ini­tial View” tab. Here, you can set the ini­tial page dis­play for­mat, open­ing page, zoom lev­els, and even what the title of the win­dow is.

Acrobat Initial View Document Properties

When you’re done, just close the Doc­u­ment Prop­er­ties win­dow and save your file. Easy!

# by Josh on June 17th, 2009 Tags: , , , ,
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Adobe Production Studio. Just breathe.

Okay.

For what­ever rea­son, I wasn’t pay­ing atten­tion when I bought CS2.

I some­how failed to realise that Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio Pro has nearly all the same things (ex. DTP stuff that I don’t really have much of a use for, but it’s nice hav­ing any­way) and more (Pre­miere, After­Ef­fects) for… not a lot more money at all.

*breathes deeply*

On the plus side, Cre­ative Suite 3 is launch­ing later this month though I don’t know if that means the next ver­sion of Pre­miere just yet. So I’ll wait til that’s an option before pur­chas­ing Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio, which means I get CS3 ver­sions of the stuff I actu­ally use — Pho­to­shop & Illus­tra­tor — and still have CS2 of non-essentials, like InDe­sign, GoLive, etc. Acro­bat is going to be alright for a while coz I’ve already got Acro­bat 8 because of relatively-late acqui­si­tion of CS2. Dreamweaver… I don’t par­tic­u­larly care about, though I’ve hap­pily used it for var­i­ous things.

And yeah, I’m still going to uni and doing all that sorta thing, so it’s cheaper. I’m just vaguely annoyed I didn’t drop $200 more for Pro­duc­tion Stu­dio when I could’ve if I’d read a bit more, but it’s done now. Hope­fully they’ll launch a new ver­sion of that along with CS3 so I can pick it up soon after the end of this month.

One day I might even make a decent amount of money out of this :P My rea­son­ing is that liv­ing at home & study­ing = good time for doing loss-running, skill– and network-building, moderately-expensive-but-just-within-means geeky things.

At the minute I’m not los­ing money on it, but it’s not some­thing I’d be able to afford to do if I were depen­dent on reg­u­lar income for rent, or what­ever. Speak­ing of reg­u­lar­ity, John C & I ran job inter­views yes­ter­day and decided to get one of the appli­cants onboard for CYIADA! So now that enters the build phase & we’re actu­ally going to be Mak­ingStuff™ that’ll become more directed and sta­ble — not in a finan­cial sense, but just in a number-of-hours-a-week kinda way. At the minute my hours have fluc­tu­ated a bit depend­ing on what I’ve been able to think of/motivated to get done, but that’ll obvi­ously sta­bilise a lot as I move back to cut­ting code and actu­ally see­ing it develop!

Any­way. Can’t wait.

# by Josh on March 22nd, 2007 Tags: , , , ,
| 5 Comments »

Adobe CS2

Just got home with it. 9 discs. Cost-per-disc works out cheaper than most games. Photoshop/Illustrator/InDesign/GoLive/Acrobat 8 (read that
twice, free upgrade goodness!)/Dreamweaver plus two resource discs (lots of fonty good­ness and some tem­plates I’ll prob­a­bly never use), a video train­ing thing, and a par­tridge in a pear tree.

Adobe CS2 Premium Academic Edition Asia Pacific/Australia region

The box is nearly big enough to fit a par­tridge (what­ever that is) in, too.

# by Josh on February 8th, 2007 Tags: , ,
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To apps that steal focus

I am jump­ing on the corpse of Adobe Acro­bat Reader Installer.

I was read­ing a PDF doc­u­ment this evening and of a sud­den there comes forth a dia­logue (unin­vited) pro­claim­ing gifts. It was, of course, a ploy to make me down­load Adobe’s crap (I do not feel par­tic­u­larly inven­tive in my invec­tive this evening — “crap” suf­fices to describe such soft­ware for the minute). For which I did not fall.

I duti­fully selected “Adobe Acro­bat Reader 9.0.7.1.6.3.4.4.32.265.5.3.3.5.3.3.whateveritsnotlikeiactuallycareanymorebecauseitstillreadsthesamecrapdoesn’tit.howhardisittomakeadocumentreaderyoudon’tneedtoupdateeverytwoweeks?“
and let it do its thing (being care­ful, as always, not to select any­thing unessen­tial). It cruised along, I started doing some­thing else (hav­ing duti­fully aban­doned what I was reading).

It (very sen­si­bly) down­loads in silence in the back­ground, and doesn’t try and get my atten­tion even when it fin­ishes: it knows that I will pay it atten­tion in due course. Indeed, I do. It begins installing (or, unpack­ing the installer).

Of a sud­den, it decides it would be an oppor­tune moment to steal focus whilst still on a progress bar dia­logue in which the only but­ton is “Can­cel”. Okay. Point one: moronic time to steal focus, no user action is required. Point two: steal­ing focus can mean the user is about to do any man­ner of things in terms of key presses or mouse clicks. Point three: when the only user inter­face ele­ment can­cels the oper­a­tion that’s press­ing this apparently-urgent update to a doc­u­ment reader (yes, it’s a freak­ing doc­u­ment reader — oh, hurry up every­one, let’s all go and patch Notepad. Dan­ger­ous secu­rity flaws! Watch out!), chances are users aren’t going to bother going back.

So, instead, I printed out the Adobe logo onto a sheet of 3-ply toi­let paper and.… okay, per­haps not so lit­eral. Suf­fice to say, I am presently in no hurry to install any more of their garbage. Stronger words could be used.

# by Josh on January 16th, 2007 Tags: ,
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Printing straight from LyX

I love it when things just work. Print­ing directly from LyX rocks. Adobe’s Acro­bat gets no oppor­tu­nity to butcher things by ‘scal­ing to fit’ (despite the page being designed with gen­er­ous mar­gins, etc.).

# by Josh on April 10th, 2006 Tags: , ,
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DPI-accurate printing in Linux

The eas­i­est way for me (see­ing as it’s too hard to get the GIMP work­ing with print dri­vers… not that I’ve par­tic­u­larly tried, but not-out-of-the-box isn’t good enough!) is sim­ply to cre­ate art­work as per usual meth­ods, exporting/saving as a PNG (because it’s loss­less, and JPEGs aren’t accept­able whilst any pre­tense of qual­ity exists) at 300dpi (or what­ever DPI, but 300 is usu­ally what I’ll be work­ing in for print), then import­ing into OpenOffice.org 2.0’s Draw. This, of course, is very focussed on deliv­er­ing a great user expe­ri­ence — print­ing works flaw­lessly. The only warn­ing I have is that if it says “out­side printer mar­gins” then select “crop” rather than scale to fit… oth­er­wise, obvi­ously, your DPI/dimensions cal­cu­lated image will go out the window.

You can also export to PDF from here, but that’s bor­ing. Same caveat applies when print­ing PDFs, by the way. I think Acro­bat defaults to scal­ing, and I imag­ine evince, et al., would also… pos­si­bly not. Alter­na­tively, find a Win­dows PC with Irfan­view on it, which is excel­lent for these kinds of things.

This post, of course, avoids the pos­si­bil­ity of Pho­to­shop and oth­ers of its kind for a rea­son. If you can afford it, you should know how to use it to print…

This brought to you by the hurriedly-assembled long-overdue Matthias Car­ols copy I promised some­one at church ages back. Actu­ally, I only did the cover as a way of apol­ogy for it tak­ing me so long ;-) Shrug.

# by Josh on March 19th, 2006 Tags: , , , , ,
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PDF magic

I’ve fallen in love with PDF all over again. Well… not quite. But it’s pretty cool.

I think it was Steve I was speak­ing to a few days back, and he alluded to Acrobat’s slide tran­si­tion capa­bil­i­ties, of which I knew noth­ing. Until I installed OpenOffice.org 2.0 on a machine I’m using for play­back tomor­row and dis­cov­ered that I couldn’t get it to fullscreen on a sec­ondary mon­i­tor (and for var­i­ous rea­sons I’m not will­ing to make my play­back screen the pri­mary mon­i­tor :|). So I fig­ured that maybe Acro­bat would.

Pull up the PDF export dia­logue… oh, an option to save tran­si­tions, cool (I didn’t use it, but it’s nice to know it’s there). More impor­tantly, there’s now a loss­less com­pres­sion option in OpenOffice’s export! Off to Acro­bat Reader to open it up, and… yes. All still there, great qual­ity, and it will fullscreen on what­ever dis­play you have the win­dow on. Beautiful.

# by Josh on December 17th, 2005 Tags:
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