Adobe Acrobat: Buttons – Part 2

Finally, I continue to expound on what buttons can do in Adobe Acrobat Pro. Most of the functions I will cover are available in many versions of Adobe Acrobat prior to Pro. If you need a refresher on basic button functions, you should look up my first write up on buttons.

Of course, if you desire to follow along, then you will want to download the files I have prepared for this article.

So, this time we are going to begin making a set of buttons that will help us navigate a document without the use of windowed navigation features, such as the next and previous page buttons on the menu bar. This style of navigation buttons can be handy in some circumstances, such as a presentation-like document opened in full-screen mode, or without the window menus and such. (The current features of a navigation bar opening in a full-screen mode does already what we are going to do, but our exercise will help us gain insight in how buttons work anyway.)

So, begin by opening our main document, a small catalog of some dinosaurs.

You will notice that I have also opened the Interactive Tool panel. This is our main access to the Button tool outside of the Forms panel.

Our first page is simply the title page, and will only be looked at initially. There is no need for a button here, but it will be nice to add an on-screen way to get to the next page, where we will build the set of buttons to use. To do this we will make a simple link.

So, first thing is to find the Link tool. It is in the Content Editing panel. Click on it and draw out a marquee surrounding the debossed area the title sits in. When it asks for what you want to do, leave it at “Go to a page view” and click OK. Navigate to the second page, where you can now click on the Set Link button in the floating dialog to set the link.

You may now go to the second page and select the Button tool. Along the bottom of the page, click and drag out a small area about 1-1/2 inches wide and under an inch high. You will notice the New Button dialog shows up. Click on its link to open the Properties dialog.

When it comes up, set the name of this button to “Previous_Page” and fill in the Tooltip to something  that tells the user to go to the previous page. Notice that the Common Properties on the bottom of this panel are for this form field to be Visible. That’s what we want at this time. If we had it Hidden, then the user would not be able to interact with it. One reason for using the Hidden setting will be given at a future installment yet.

So next we progress to the Appearance tab. Here we simply want to set the background and border to None. We can ignore the Text settings, since we will not place any text in this button.

We will ignore the Position tab, which is only found from Adobe Acrobat Pro XI and beyond, and move to the Options tab. Here’s where we begin to have some fun! We are going to use an icon for the appearance of the button. An icon is simply a graphic we create in some other application, such as Adobe Illustrator, to make the button look differently from what you can get from within Adobe Acrobat’s options (which aren’t much).

As long as you can export your graphic out to either a PDF, PNG or similar file format, then you should be able to use it in your PDF document. I wouldn’t recommend a JPEG file, because if you have a rounded corner or any non-rectangular shape, you will get a solid white background in your non-image areas. Luckily for this exercise, I have some buttons pre-made for us.

So, drop down the Layout menu and choose Icon only from the list of options. Choose Invert for the Behavior for now. You will notice that so far there is only an “up” state for this button. Next, click on the Choose Icon button. Navigate to where you have the Buttons folder of these project files, and select the file called “left_arrow_wshadow_ylw-up.pdf” and click through the OKs. When you get back to the Button Properties dialog, you should see a yellow arrow graphic pointing left within your button marquee.

Next, click on the Advanced... button to get into the Icon Placement dialog. This feature controls the way your icon will look within the button field area. You have options for when to scale your icon, and for aligning your icon relative to the sides or center of the button field. For this button, choose Never for the scale, and we will keep the position centered within the button field.

Now we have to add the all-important action. Click on the Actions tab, select Mouse Up as the trigger and Execute a menu item as the action. Click on Add... to find a listing of menu items. Here you see items that are in common with Adobe Acrobat Pro and Adobe Reader. It is up to 3rd party PDF software developers to allow these commands to be in common with their packages. Select “View > Page Navigation >  Previous Page” as your action.

By the way, the field box properties dialog is pretty versatile in one way: it can remain open as long as you have the Button tool selected. You don’t have to close it when going from one button or form field to the next, just click on the next field you wish to modify and it will reflect the options of that selected field.

However, at this time we want to close the field properties dialog, because we want to test this button to see if and how it works! So click on Close and then choose the Hand tool in Acrobat’s toolbar. Click on your new button and your document should go to the previous page, the first page in this case. Congratulations! Now we can go back to the next page.

Now that you have one button, it isn’t hard to make another one! Choose the Select Object tool in the Interactive Objects pane and click on the Previous Page button field. Hold down the Option/Alt and Shift keys and drag it to the right. This should make a copy of this button field. Double-click on it to open the properties dialog.

Now, we can change the particulars of this button so it becomes the Next Page button. The reason for working from a copy of the other button is that many other aspects of it, such as the size of the box, the background, how we scale/size the icon graphic and so forth, are already established. We should only need to change a few things.

Go to the General tab and change the field name and tip to say Next page.

Go to the Options tab and click on Choose Icon... and navigate to the button graphic “right_arrow_wshadw_ylw-up.pdf” to select it as the icon for this button.

Then go to the Actions tab and select the Execute a menu item action. You will see an Edit button become available, which, of course, you should click on to bring up the list of menu commands to use.  Select “View > Page Navigation >  Next Page” as your action.

Select the specific action to edit it.

Finally, we will copy one of these buttons to make a Home button, so you can go back to this intro page. Like before, select one of these buttons with the Option/Alt and Shift keys held down as you drag it over to the center of the group of buttons.

Double-click on it to bring up the Properties dialog and change the Name and Tip fields to Home.

Go to the Options tab and load in the next icon file, “home_button_ylw-up.pdf.” Resize the box to show the entire icon. Don’t worry about the position of the box just now.

In the Actions tab, delete the current action and drop down the Select Action menu to choose the Go to a page view option. When you click on the Add... button, the Set Link box will come up. Simply click Set Link to make the current page the destination.

Boy! We've done a lot here, but before we finish for this lesson (and leave you hanging for a while), we will do a little housekeeping on these buttons.

Use the Select Object tool to draw a marquee surrounding all three buttons. Then right-click on one of them to bring up a context-sensitve menu. As far as I know, this is the only access available for some of the functions you find on this menu. Find the Align, Distribute or Center menu and wait for the fly-out menu of options to show. Scroll over to the Distribute Horizontally to even the buttons out. Then choose that Align, Distribute or Center menu once more and find Align Horizontally to line them up on their vertical centers.

There you have it, a set of navigation buttons to use in this wonderful PDF document. And now you can pride yourself in learning something more that Adobe Acrobat Pro can do with buttons.

Say again? We have to get these on the other pages? Oh. Well, we will have to take care of that in the next episode, as we have some other work to accomplish before that happens. Sorry to leave you hanging like that. See you back soon!

Saving (Your) As...

This is just a very important tip for anyone who works on various computer files. (Gee, would that be just about everyone?)

There are usually just two times when most people use the Save As... function found in most any application. Those times are when:

1. they initially save their work, and 
2. when they want to make a new file based off of the one they have and wish to save under a new file name. (I am aware that most database applications do not have a Save function. I forget whether FileMaker Pro has a Save As... function.)

Hitting simply Save (Command-S/Control-S) is so easy! Most Apple applications now set it differently. There is a Save command and a Duplicate command. The Duplicate command will actually spin off a new copy of your file into a new window, leaving the original intact. This answers the need for #2 above.

The Save command will function just like the old Save As... when condition #1 is being met. If you have just created a new document, and after starting to enter your information you choose Save, you will get the initial dialog for naming your file and determining where you will store it. For Apple and other OS X apps, you can get to Save As... by holding down the Option key as you click on the File menu.

All this is probably way too simple for your current experience on a computer, but I had to start here just in case you are fairly new to computers.

Many third party applications, especially those from Adobe and others related to graphics and production art, still retain the Save As... function in the File menu.

As I said above, the easy thing to do is always choose Save while working on your file. But did you know there are some reasons why it may be wise to choose Save As... occasionally?

When you initially save a file, the computer writes the file as a complete unit, with all the parameters of the document, settings for font, colors, margins, etc. and whatever data you had in the document itself. A nice, neat package.

Now, as you work and Save, the additional information you enter into your document gets written into your file, but not necessarily in the most efficient place. The new data gets written at the end of your file, and there the latest information gets written as you continue to Save your file. When you open your file again, the application looks at the file, finds the initial parameters of your document and writes that into memory, then as it finds new information at the end of the file, it reads it and places it into your document and into memory. So, even though this takes only extra milliseconds, it is not the fastest read of your file that you could have.

Not only that, but it may not be the safest way to keep your file. Let's say there is just one little glitch in saving your information the last time you chose Save. All your file information is there, but at the very end of your file, something gets corrupted or miswritten, and potentially you have introduced a problem in your file. It may open, but it may not behave as you expect at some certain point. Then again, it may not open at all.

When all you use is Save, another thing happens; your file gets larger. Naturally, your file will get larger as you add more information into your document. However, when you use Save over and over, and as you write all that data in chunks at the end of your file, it gets larger than it should. It can be 20% larger or more, depending on the type of file it is. This is because the file is being written so inefficiently.

The answer, of course, is to use the Save As... function every so often. When you choose Save As..., you will get the Save dialog, but you can ignore giving your file a different name, and keep it in the same location. When you click Save/OK, your computer will ask if you want to replace/overwrite the file saved in this location, which is, of course the one you have open right now. Go ahead, and the computer writes your file completely in one whole package, just like when you saved it the first time. This is also called a clean save.

In the examples below, you will see the info for one file saved several times by just choosing Save. Next to that is the same file after having chosen Save As..., or after a clean save. You will note right away the difference in file size.

So there you have the reasons to use Save As... more often than not. Keep up the good work!

Adobe Acrobat X: Buttons - Part 1

A lack of PDF buttons

There is scarcely any aspect of Adobe Acrobat dealt with leaner than the idea of using buttons in a PDF document. If you do a web search for this topic, you will find very few articles, and most of them involve using JavaScript with the button actions, or they actually use LiveCycle Designer, which I don't get to use, because I am on a Macintosh. (Hey, LiveCycle Designer programmers, why don't you port that over to the Mac?)

So, I of course, aim to remedy this lack of information on Acrobat buttons and all the wonderful things you can accomplish with them.

For now it should be enough just to create a button and show how to get it to do something. Later we will try more and advanced stuff.

What you can do is follow along, if you download the sample working file(s) I have made available here. Otherwise, you are invited to create your own project as we go along.

Simple Button Creation

I will open a simple document of a few pages, with an indicator of the page number on each page. Nothing fancy.

Another thing; I am using Adobe Acrobat Pro XI, so the placement of tools and items within your version of Adobe Acrobat may be different.

So, first step: find and choose the button tool. In Adobe Acrobat Pro XI it is found in the Interactive Objects tools pane. If you don’t see Interactive Objects, then go to the menu View > Tools > Interactive Objects. (Previous versions of Adobe Acrobat Pro may have the Button tool in the Content toolbox or elsewhere.)



Next, draw out a box about 1 inch wide and 1/2 inch high with the Button tool. You notice a pop up will show immediately with a field name of “Button1” and little else, except one text line in the bottom right corner saying “All Properties.” For now don’t click that.

Of course, you’ll notice that the button is a field, for it says Field Name. Buttons are part of the whole form fields package that Adobe Acrobat Pro makes available. Because of this, a button has many uses  you may not even imagine yet. However, there are a couple of particulars you need to keep in mind because of this.

Number 1: as a field, each button should have a unique name given it. If any number of fields in a PDF file have the same name, the function of the PDF may get messed up, since the same data or function acted upon one field with that name, will be attached to the other fields with that name. The only exception would be the Radio Button form field, which we cannot spend time on right now.

A button field, though it doesn’t act like any other part of a form, will be recognized as a form element, and so the PDF file with only one button will be recognized as a form and may open with a menu bar for working with forms.

OK, back to our button. Now it’s time to click the All Properties link at the bottom of the big label box. This will open the Properties dialog. (If you have already clicked anywhere else in your document, you may have noticed the label box went away. That’s OK, you can get to the All Properties dialog by double-clicking on the button.)

You see that the name of the button is selected here. Let’s rename it to say “Page2.” Hit your Tab key to move into the Tooltip field and type in “Goes to page 2.” The Tooltip gives the user a clue what the button (or any field) is for by showing your tip as the cursor hovers over the button. The Tooltip also acts as Alt Text for interactivity and compliance.

Next, select the Appearance tab to see the options there. You notice the fill color is currently a light gray (the default). Click on the little gray swatch next to the Fill Color label and choose something like a pure magenta. Depending on your operating system, you may have differing available color pickers.

The Text section sets your style of text in the label of the button, which is the text that shows up inside your button; this is only an option of course, you don’t have to have any text if you wish to keep your users guessing, or if prefer to use a graphic for your button otherwise (more on that some future time).

One quick note about the Font you choose. You will see a few fonts in the very top of your font list, with a line dividing these from your usual fonts list. These are the lowest common denominator fonts, meaning that everyone who opens your PDF file should have those fonts. It is best not to use fonts from below that line UNLESS you can guarantee every user of your PDF file will have those fonts available on their operating system.

Now choose the Options tab and observe the many possible settings you have available. For now just place your cursor in the Label area and type “To page 2.” When you hit the Tab key you should see your text appear in the button.

Now we have a button that is presentable to the user, except for one thing; we have to make the button do something! So, choose the Actions tab next. You may observe the straightforward options presented here. You have a Trigger to choose, and the drop-down list is filled with six possibilities. We will get to explain these in further excursions into Acrobat buttons, but for now, just leave it at Mouse Up.

Suffice it to say that the Mouse Up option is the default behavior for just about any button in a computer application or web page. The action is triggered when you release the mouse button from the button, rather than on the click down. This allows a user the option to think twice about triggering the action, and to move the cursor away from the button before releasing it to avoid the action.

So, now we get to say what we want to have happen. Drop down the menu for Select Action to see all the possible types of actions available. There are quite a number of choices, but for now scroll down a few to, “Go to a page view,” then click on Add....

You will see a little window come up with the instructions for creating a link. Navigate to page 2 of this PDF file and then click on “Set Link.”

Now you may close the Properties box and select the hand tool. Click on your new button and watch it move to page 2 of the PDF file.

Congratulations! You now have a fully functioning button!

Adobe Acrobat Learning

If you have been around in the graphics world for a little while, I would be surprised if you have not heard about Adobe Acrobat and how it is used for PDF file creation and editing. Adobe has certainly had great success with this file format, and Acrobat is undoubtedly the most capable of PDF file editing and optimizing applications available.

True, there are many other PDF-editing applications, some smaller in scope, and others that way out-perform Acrobat. However, Acrobat is what I use in and outside of work. I have used Acrobat since it was first released in 1993, and I have never encountered another file format or application that comes close to it's usefulness for sending files to others for work evaluation or information sharing.

By the way, what was that file format that Microsoft was going to launch as its own kind of “portable document” file? Did it fall flat on its face?

When Acrobat first came out, there was one other file format some company had begun to bring out. I remember it was called Common Ground, and it may have first started on the Unix platform, on Sun workstations. However, it never amounted to anything. Acrobat came on the scene and dominated almost immediately. The only problem with it at first was that QuarkXPress stubbornly refused to support the PDF file format. That later proved to be a contributing factor to QuarkXPress’ downfall from its lofty perch.

Anyway, I think it is high time I should concentrate on sharing some of the most important things I have learned while using Adobe Acrobat over the years. Over the next few weeks or months I will share out of my “vast depth” of experience, and hopefully some of these pointers will be useful to you.

Photoshop: Lighting Effects Returns!

Ye Olde Lighting Effects

On my latest excursion into the recently released Adobe Photoshop CS6 I stumbled upon a great surprise: Adobe has brought back and revamped the stalwart filter Lighting Effects.

If you are familiar with the latest releases of Adobe's Creative Suite, you probably were made aware of some of the features of Photoshop dropping out of existence because of the move from 32-bit to 64-bit processors. Between CS4 and CS6, Lighting Effects was one of them, along with others like the Extract command. The Extract command has returned within the confines of the Refine Edges panel, but nothing replaced Lighting Effects. Unfortunately it was just gone, much to my discouragement, because I have relied on that feature for many things.

Revamp a plain background with Lighting Effects

Happily, Adobe has updated it for 64-bit processing, and made it better by a few degrees as well. For your learning insight, I will go through an example of using this handy feature. I will start with a basic setup for a logo, with somewhat of a glow, neon effect. To give it more atmosphere I aim to embellish the "wall" this neon logotype hangs on.



Currently, the wall is plain and lifeless. It certainly doesn't give us the idea of someone turning the lights on after normal operating hours. So, I will add a couple of lights. After copying the blue background layer, I opened the Lighting Effects filter by going to Filters > Render > Lighting Effects.

A new interface for filters

The first thing I noticed when I opened this filter is Photoshop CS6's new interface for filters and similar operations. Photoshop keeps as many aspects of this filter interactive on-screen, with the panel controls off to the side. Certain controls are available by clicking on certain areas of the on-screen light proxy. As far as that goes, you don't even notice any difference between normal editing mode and this one, except for the fact that you have to hit an apply button to get out of this filter operation.



To rotate the light, place your cursor over one of the handles of the outer ellipse. To expand or contract the light's illuminating area, click on the inner ellipse. Change the intensity of the light source by dragging within the inside central ring. You choose which type of light you currently are using by the top menu on the options panel. Additional lights are available at the upper left of the window.

After setting the first light, I added another spot with a slightly greener blue color.



Use a texture with Lighting Effects

Now, this basic lighting effects stuff gives us a good start. However the wall is still just flat and uninteresting. I am thinking this would look much more appropriate as a brick wall. So, I just so happened to have created a seamless brick pattern to use. How will I use this? As an alpha channel that we can plug into the lighting effects Texture option.

So, I next create an empty layer with the brick pattern overlay fill. The best approach for seamless patterns is to create them amply large, so you only need to scale down rather than up for their use. Here, I scaled my pattern down to 19 percent. (Hint: A pattern overlay allows you to scale it!)


So, then I viewed this layer alone, opened the Channels panel, and copied one of the component channels (the Blue one) to make a new alpha channel. Next, I inverted this alpha channel, and brought in a Texturizer filter, to give the bricks some roughness.




Load edited alpha channel into LE Texture option

Now I'm ready for the final touch. I open the lighting effects filter settings on the wall layer and go to the Texture option. Then I choose the alpha channel I just finished editing to allow lighting effects to use it for a bump map.

Now we can see the final result is much improved from the plain original, thanks to what lighting effects can do.

Ernie's blog: On A Quest To Hire The Über Production Artist

Ernie adds to the Production Artist dialog with a thorough article.

Ernie's blog: On A Quest To Hire The Über Production Artist

Video Compatibility Across Platforms

Like many other production artists, I work on Macs. Most office-related employees, such as account managers, work on Windows-running PCs. When is comes to exchanging documents between these platforms (and Unix computers), many things have become much easier than it was about six or more years ago. For example, fonts have turned a major corner over the last few years with the entrance of OpenType formatted fonts (.otf). The same OpenType font can function the same on any platform you use your document.

One Arena Remaining

Alas, the same is not true for video files however. For the most part, the video world is a morass of choices to make, like going into an ice cream shop with hundreds of flavors. I'm not talking about the web, of course. Most web videos, such as go on YouTube or into a web movie preview site, are translated via a Flash player or some QuickTime format. But when you want to have a video file say, saved from iMovie, play on a Windows PC in a specific program, like PowerPoint, then you may run into unscalable walls.

I have worked at previous companies that had some video production software and hardware that helped out in this regard. I’ve worked with Final Cut Express and related programs. With those, the translation to other video formats is a lot easier. But where I am working now, there is not much to work with except iMovie, QuickTime, Flash, iMovie HD and Adobe Media Encoder.

There are a number of video file formats available that most people are familiar with, but also dozens more. There’s QuickTime (.mov), Windows Media (.wmv), Audio Video Interleave (.avi), MPEG, or Moving Picture Experts Group (.mpg), DivX-Encoded Movie File (.divx), and so forth. For a comprehensive list this FileInfo page is good.

File formats for video, however, are only containers for the content. What’s more important are the languages used to translate that content from the file to the player. These are called codecs. Codec stands for COMpression and DECompression language. A video file natively is really big. Think of hundreds of pictures put together in a sequence, with each picture a certain resolution and dimension. Just one frame from an HD 720p video frame is 2.64 megabytes. Just a short minute of video that size could be almost two or more gigabytes!

So understandably to store and transfer video, we need these codecs to shrink the size of the video files. And when we play it, we need this codec to decompress it on the fly and send each frame to the player in time. Some codecs do this efficiently and some not so much. And the older the codec, the probability is that it degrades the original video a lot, or doesn’t compress it very much.

All this is enough to understand why I had the worst time trying to get a video file saved out of iMovie to play in Microsoft PowerPoint 2007 on a Windows PC. It would seem that there are many codecs for Windows Media files (.wmv) that are not accepted by PowerPoint. Now I am pretty sure that MS PowerPoint must use the system media capabilities rather than its own. I figured we needed a conversion capability to go into a Windows Media format. At the time, I only knew about Flip4Mac, which can play WMV files. A paid upgrade will allow some saving into WMV format. I soon would find out that it must take a lot more than just any WMV file to play on PowerPoint.

Flip Over This

My first impasse was with Flip4Mac. I got approval to spend the $39 to upgrade to the first level of capability for Flip4Mac to save out to WMV format on a Mac. I found quickly that $39 (plus tax) is not enough. For that price, you get a maximum of 640 pixels wide and only one pass VBR (Variable Bit Rate encoding). And the resulting quality is horrible. Not only that, but it isn’t available out of iMovie ’09. In fact, it isn’t available through QuickTime directly unless you wish to spend another $30 for QuickTime Pro. I only found the capability via iMovie HD’s Share menu. (To upgrade fully to all the WMV options you could need, please pay an additional $130 to the makers of Flip4Mac.)

What was even more disheartening was that the resultant WMV file would not play in MS PowerPoint on the PC. It played in Windows Media Player, however. Now if it is made by Microsoft, and it plays in one application they make, but not in this other one, what is the problem? Why wouldn’t Microsoft make all their applications compatible with what they work with, across the same platform, which they are owners of as well? Further trials to AVI and other formats did not help either.

Some Other Options

In the process, I found a couple of web sites that offer conversion of video and audio files to various formats. They are in beta version, and offer their services free to start. If you wish to have storage space or other features, you need to pay monthly fees that vary with the options available. One site is called Zamzar, which I liked because the quality of their conversion is very good. However, they use a DIVx codec, so video from there did not play in PowerPoint on a PC for me.

I tried getting QuickTime installed a PC to test whether QuickTime movies would play in PowerPoint on the PC. Nope. (Is there some issue with a PC and video of which I may be unaware? Possibly.) All I got was a black box where the video should have been on the slide.

The Answer

Well, after a few more well-considered options, and finding no solution, I decided to go a route I was pretty sure would work. Each of the PCs that were going to run this presentation had an up-to-date installation of Adobe Reader, version 8, 9 or X. And that meant one thing for video: Flash Video, or .flv format.

Over the last few years Adobe has been working on the problem of video compatibility. Since there seemed to be no progress between Windows Media on the PC and QuickTime on the Macintosh, the programmers at Adobe went ahead and made their own media format to run cross-platform without depending on the operating system’s video rendering engine. They came up with Flash Video format. This works now inside Adobe Acrobat, Flash and other Adobe programs.

So, to make this easy to end, I converted the QuickTimes from iMovie to FLV via Adobe Media Encoder. Then I saved out the PowerPoint presentation as a PDF, sans the videos. Then in Acrobat I placed the videos, set up the transitions to auto flip based on the rehearsed times from the PowerPoint presentation. And now everything in this project functions just fine on PC and on Mac. And that’s all I was asking for.