Adobe Acrobat and PDF Tips and Resources

An edited selection of the best Acrobat resources online.

What a huge and wondrous program! It's my favorite out of all the ones in the Creative Suite Premium package. To keep this page down to a reasonable size, I'm focusing on resources for print designers. Since PDF workflows are such a big part of our lives these days, I've also included resources that deal with creating PDFs from other programs.

Acrobat Tips from DesignGeek e-zine

Best Acrobat and PDF Resources from Adobe's Web Site

Acrobat 9 Tryout: Because I'm so special, Adobe is letting me have Acrobat 9 for free!
For the next 30 days I can make PDFs, edit PDFs, create forms,
create presentations, hold online meetings, and otherwise live like PDF royalty. If you too are special you might, maybe, also get Acrobat for free. It's good for 30 days, but the clock doesn't start ticking until you install the file you downloaded.
What's New in Acrobat 9: Acrobat 9 now comes in 3 flavors: Acrobat Pro Extended, Acrobat Pro, and Acrobat Standard. What does each flavor do? Which one is right for you? Get your head around what's new and link to other resources from this page.
Download Reader 9: As usual, Adobe's latest version of Reader is free to all takers.
Conduct Client Reviews On-Line with Acrobat.com: Impress the heck out of your clients with your uber-geekosity and cutting edge on-line collaboration savvy. Share files online, store files online, make PDFs online (5 free), Share your screen with other users, or actually write and create documents together with Adobe's online word processor Buzzword.

Known issues and work-arounds for Adobe Reader 9 and Adobe Acrobat 9: Even Acrobat has issues. Adobe addresses them here! The issues appear in the lower half of the page.

The next three items are some of the most useful documents related to Acrobat from the Print Resource Center page in the Adobe Studio section of Adobe's site (no need to register or log in to get these).

PDF/X Files and Adobe Creative Suite 3 (PDF, 1.4M)

What's the difference between PDF/X-1a and PDF/X-3? How do you convert a PDF to a PDF/X in Acrobat? Anything special you should keep in mind if you're creating PDFs with Distiller vs. exporting to PDFs from the CS2 programs? Get all the nitty-gritty here.

Transparency in Adobe Applications: A Print Production Guide (PDF, 5.1M)

This 58-page guide is meant for print providers but is fascinating and illuminating reading for anyone who's ever wanted to use transparency features in their projects but were afraid they wouldn't print well. It covers all the technical aspects of maintaining and flattening transparency in Photoshop, InDesign, Illustrator and Acrobat.

A Designer's Guide to Printing with Transparency (PDF, 5.5M)

A simpler version of the Transparency Print Production Guide above, these 35 pages are aimed smack-dab at the nervous designer. It has lots of pretty pictures (thus the larger file size) and simple language that even an MFA can understand.

Create Adobe PDF Online — First 5 Free!

Don't have a full version of Acrobat but need to quickly create a true distilled PDF? No problem. Adobe's online "Create Adobe PDF" service will take your uploaded file, turn it into a PDF and e-mail it back to you, often within minutes. The first five files are free, after that you can pay as you go or via a subscription. (Since you can create press-ready PDFs from virtually any Microsoft or Adobe product with an export to PDF command, I assume this is mainly for QuarkXPress users.)

Color Workflows for Adobe Creative Suite 3 (PDF 4.6M)

What does it mean, actually, when Adobe says that "Safe CMYK" workflow is the default for CS3 apps? What are you supposed to do with the ICC profiles that Photoshop keeps embedding in your images but your pre-press vendor keeps ignoring? This paper has some well thought-out explanations and answers. The CS2 version PDF is still available here.

Best Ways to Get Help with Acrobat and PDFs from Other Users

Adobe's Forums: Mac Acrobat | Windows Acrobat: Adobe's best-kept secret is the incredible support users offer other users on their forums. Reading is painless (click "login as guest" button), posting/replying requires free registration.

Planet PDF Forums: The self-proclaimed "home of the PDF community", Planet PDF is a comprehensive, popular indie site that focuses exclusively on Acrobat/PDF users and uses. Planet PDF caters to anyone and everyone interested in PDFs, from professional print/web publishers seeking appropriate tools, to wide-eyed beginners wondering what "PDF" stands for. Login as a Guest and peruse the Acrobat forums to your heart's content.
Adobe Acrobat User Community Forums: The forums here are well organized and very active. From what I've seen the questions run the gamut from basic to advanced and the replies were courteous and helpful. Don't you just hate that?

Best Adobe Acrobat Online/Video Training


Acrobat 9 Pro Tips and Tricks: You can do so much with Acrobat. I had to put together this tutorial series for Lynda.com to share some of my favorite features with all of you. I've created 3 hours of tutorials that will show you how to update and repurpose content in your PDF. You'll find additional tutorials for working with signatures, comments, portfolios and browsers that will allow you to do more with your PDFs.
Lynda.com's Acrobat Training
Acrobat 9 | Acrobat 8: Lynda.com offers DVD-based or online Acrobat training as a series of Quicktime training movies, including a few free sample movies. They are up-to-date with offerings for Acrobat 9, plus older versions going back to version 5 are also still available. Topics include essentials training as well as advanced features like forms and collaboration.

Other Acrobatic Web Pages with Neat Stuff

PDF Planet's Software Finder: Amazingly there's almost 1,000 products that extend Acrobat's prowess, some of them free. Check it out.
Adobe Blog for Legal Professionals: Adobe ACE, Rick Borstein's Acrobat blog is packed with tips, techniques and tutorials for members of the legal community. His post, Redaction Tips and Techniques for Acrobat 9, could be used by people working in almost any profession.

PDFZone.com's PDF Tips & Techniques: Great Design-Geekish tips all about PDFs are posted every couple days or weeks or so. You can also sign up and have them sent to you. (Looks like most of the tips are re-posts of the good forum threads.)

Adobe Acrobat User Community: AcrobatUsers.com boasts 8,000 users in 80 countries all sharing their expertise and ideas through this site. They've got posts for everything you need to get the most out of Acrobat, including blogs, news, articles, tips, and tutorials.

Gary Cosimini's Acrobat Game (PDF, 60K): Many moons ago, as a fun little way to show off Acrobat 3's new Forms functionality, Adobe employee Gary Cosimini (who is now a major muckety-muck at Adobe) created this interesting little Jeopardy-like game in a 60K PDF. Check out File->Document Properties->Description to see just how old this PDF is.


Acrobat 7.0 Printing Guide (PDF, 5M): I wish it were updated, but it's still full of good info. This white paper is a must read for creating all types of PDFs. You'll also find information about Adobe PDF settings, preflighting documents, correcting problems in the PDF with Acrobat Pro 7 and communicating print information to customers (or helping your provider communicate them to you!).

Virtual Training Company's Adobe Acrobat Lessons

Acrobat 8 | Acrobat 7

Another great source of on-line Quicktime training tutorials is VTC. but they're not yet up to date with Acrobat 9. Still, if you're using Acrobat Pro 8, these are terrific lessons to take. VTC offers dozens of short, optimized-for-the-web online Quicktime movies, or order all of them on a CD for $99 to get the highest quality Quicktime files. Either way, all sample files used in the lessons are included.

Total Training For Adobe Acrobat:
Acrobat 9 | Acrobat 8

These 8-hour video training packages are written and presented by Acrobat veteran, Tim Plumer. You'll finally learn how to how to use the highlighter tool, sticky note and other cool commenting tools. The discs also include several hours of advanced techniques.