Re: Adobe Acrobat and MUGs
Re: Adobe Acrobat and MUGs
- Subject: Re: Adobe Acrobat and MUGs
- From: Jim Foster <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 14 Oct 2004 22:04:56 -0400
On 14-Oct-04, at 9:31 PM, email@hidden wrote:
What do you all use Acrobat for?
For the most part, our MUG simply turns over our copy of Adobe Acrobat
to our newsletter editor, who in turn uses it to process each month's
Quark or InDesign or PageMaker or whatever newsletter file format into
a universally readable PDF file which we upload to our web site.
I'm sure other members of the MUG Executive could find uses for Acrobat
also, but while some of them have opined that the single copy we have
either won or purchased through Adobe's programs or events should be
useable by anyone so long as it is being used in the interests of the
MUG, I have taken the position that it is a single-user copy just like
one that anyone would purchase. This does kind of limit its usage in
the club, but on the other hand probably generates additional sales for
Adobe as more and more people see the range of things it can do.
For example, I have my own copy of Acrobat. Recently, one of our longer
term members dragged out os her closet a breakfast cereal box which she
had been using to store just about every copy of our MUG newsletter
which had ever been issued. Her Library went back to our inaugural
issue in January of 1988. Bottom line was that she had over 60 issues
which we had never been able to load up to our web site Library because
by the time we set up our web site no one still had any electronic
copies of those past issues, and we hadn't known that anyone still had
paper copies.
Now, by borrowing her paper library, we've been able to scan each page
as a jpeg document, then use GraphicConverter to do some editing and
formatting of each page and save it as a pdf file, then use the full
version of Acrobat to "stitch" all these single page pdf files into a
single file that represents an entire issue of our newsletter, which we
have then uploaded to our web site. I am actually right now down to
just a half dozen more issues to process. After this huge project,
there are still a fair number of months for which we do not have a file
available, and frankly we don't have a record of whether we even
created a newsletter for those months, but we can now realistically run
a contest encouraging all of our members to look through their closets
and try to track down any remaining missing issues.
Another way I have used Acrobat is for either doing a demo of an
Internet web site when I don't actually have access to the Internet at
our meetings, or at the very least creating a backup solution in the
event that we lose or can't establish our internet connection when we
get to our meeting site. Acrobat allows you to call up a web page and
have it convert that into a pdf document, but the REAL hoot is that
there's a dialog box which asks you how many levels DOWN you want it to
go in harvesting additional web pages which are linked off that first
page. If you are not careful, you can easily end up with a 600 page pdf
file! But the advantage is that when you pull up this PDF file onto
your screen, all the links in the main page work just they would have
worked in your browser. The ONLY problem is that the forward and
backward buttons refer to the next and previous pages in the PDF file
rather than the pages you last viewed, so you need to practice your
navigation skills before actually doing the presentation.
GA
Jim Foster
President
Macintosh Users East [MaUsE]
http://www.mause.ca
_______________________________________________
Do not post admin requests to the list. They will be ignored.
Augd mailing list (email@hidden)
Help/Unsubscribe/Update your Subscription:
This email sent to email@hidden