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*** DesignGeek (tm) ***
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Tips and techniques for the digital designer
In this issue:
-- Pres. Obama's PDF Team Could Use Some Help
-- Force the Search Panel to Open in Reader/Acrobat
-- Last Day to Save $200 on Adobe CS4
-- Handy Em Chart for Web Designers
Issue 74, 2/27/09
Written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion
... for her clients, colleagues, random contacts and interested subscribers
** Want more tips? Follow me on twitter: http://twitter.com/amarie **
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President Obama's PDF Team Could Use Some Help
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So ... the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka "the stimulus bill" aka "H.R. 1") ... have you downloaded it yet? You can do so by going to this page and clicking the link to the PDF:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ARRA_public_review/
You don't have to download it right now, but just know that it's a regular PDF, very long (575 pages), full of text.
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Rush Limbaugh vs. PDF
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It cracked me up to learn that uber-conservative Rush Limbaugh ranted about the document's PDF format being a sneaky plot of the "Obama Democrats." On his February 13th 2009 broadcast -- which was the same day as the Congressional vote on the bill -- Rush informed his listeners:
"They have reformatted the bill. They've made it a PDF file when they posted it. Now, for those of you that don't use computers, basically what that means is that it cannot be keyword searched. A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page, and so you can read every page but you cannot keyword search it. It's not a text file as legislation normally is, as posted on these public websites. They don't want anybody knowing what's in this."
(Full transcript: http://tr.im/rush)
I guess Rush didn't bother to actually *open* the PDF, where he would have seen a large text box in the default toolbar with the word FIND in it, even in Reader. Hint, hint. And indeed, the entire document is searchable text ... I tried it myself just to make sure.
As Kurt Foss said in his Acrobat.com blog post (where I first read about this), if Rush was pining for "a text file as legislation normally is," he could've have chosen Save as Text from Reader's File menu. It took Kurt under a minute to save the entire 575-page PDF to a text file.
Kurt offers a few more helpful Reader tips for Rush and his staff in this post:
http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/kfoss/rush-pdf-search-judgment
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The White House Needs an Acrobat Trainer
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Okay, so Rush is a PDF noob, but so are tens of thousands of others. They're looking for the familiar menu bars from Word or Notepad, and when the comparatively mysterious Reader toolbar appears instead, they freak out a bit.
What could the White House communications department have done to make the PDF easier to deal with for Rush et.al.? Plenty!
Open the thing and you'll find it's a pretty raw export to PDF (from a program called "ACOMP.exe" per Acrobat's File > Document Properties). It's not tagged for accessibility. There are no bookmarks. No navigation buttons. No metadata. There aren't even any page numbers!
Here's what I would do to the file in Acrobat before securing it and posting it to the whitehouse.gov web site for general distribution:
- Add page numbers, probably centered in the header or footer, where I'm seeing plenty of white space. Do this right in Acrobat, in the Document > Header & Footer > Add dialog box (look for the Add Page Number button). Makes it easier for the "drive-by media" (to use Rush's term) to refer to specific pages.
- Add metadata in File > Properties. I don't mean add keywords for SEO ... I don't think the US government's web site needs to be optimized for search engines ... but at least add the proper title to the thing: "H.R. 1: American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009."
- Set the PDF to open with the Title in the title bar instead of the file name. Do this in File > Properties, in the Initial View tab. While you're there you may as well click the Initial View tab and set the Magnification to Fit in Window, always a nice touch, so regardless of the size of your Reader window or monitor the entire first page is visible at the start.
- Add bookmarks. This thing is crying out for bookmarks. Consider setting the bookmarks panel to open by default (in Initial View, see above) for the noobs.
- Embed an index so searching the document is nice and fast. I explained how to do this in DesignGeek 62, "Faster Searching in Big PDFs."
- Set up the PDF to open the Search panel automatically. For the ultimate in kindness to end users (and to prevent Rush-like confusion in the first place), I'd set up the PDF so that the Search panel opens by default. It's one of my favorite PDF tips! I included a video tutorial showing exactly how to do this in my latest title for Lynda.com, Acrobat Pro 9 Tips and Tricks. (Or you can read the how-to in the next story.)
Now ... if any reader has White House connections, could you do us all a favor and forward this article on to them? And let them know I'm available for a training session via Connect. A couple hours should do it. ;-)
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Force the Search Panel to Open in Reader/Acrobat
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The problem we're solving here is that few end users realize you can run Google-like searches in a PDF you've sent them, even from Reader. The Search command is buried in the Edit menu, while its weaker cousin, Find, gets its own field in the default toolbar, along with the well-known Command/Ctrl-F command.
You can force the Search feature's interactive panel to open by default whenever the PDF is opened, making it QUITE OBVIOUS that the PDF is searchable. It works even if the PDF is opened in the browser window ... well, in Safari, at least.
Download this quickie demo PDF I made (just one page) to see it in action:
http://senecadesign.com/demo/search_panel_demo.pdf
To reveal the Search panel automatically in a PDF, open it in Acrobat 8 or 9 and follow these steps:
- Open the Pages panel in Acrobat (click the Pages icon in the left toolbar, or choose View > Navigation Toolbars > Pages) to view the automatically-generated page thumbnails of the PDF file.
- Right-click on the Page 1 thumbnail and choose Page Properties from the contextual menu.
- Click the Actions tab in the Page Properties dialog box. The Select Trigger menu should be at Page Open by default, and the Select Action menu is set to Execute a Menu Item by default. Perfect.
- Click the Add button to see a list of Menu Items you can specify.
- Select the menu item "Edit > Search" in the list and click OK.
- Click OK one more time to save the Page Action and close the Page Properties dialog box, and then save your changes to the PDF.
To test it, close the PDF and then open it again from File > Open Recent. You should see the Search panel immediately appear on the left. Try opening it in Reader, you'll see the same thing.
There are all sorts of fun Page Actions you can add to a given page, you should play around with it when you get a chance.
The key here though is that by adding a Page Action to the first page of the PDF, and making sure the PDF is set to open to that page -- it is by default -- in File > Document Properties: Initial View, you can make things happen as soon as a PDF is opened.
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Last Day to Save $200 on Adobe CS4
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Adobe released the latest iteration of their Creative Suite, CS4, last October, and back then, their "limited time upgrade offer deadline" of February 28, 2009 seemed so far off, didn't it?
And now ... the end is near ... and so we face ... the final daytosave200dollars .... (that was me imitating Frank Sinatra).
Here's the skinny: If you're upgrading from CS3 to CS4, there is no deadline to worry about. The upgrade price remains the same as it's always been, $499 for CS4 Standard and $599 for CS4 Premium.
The savings deal is for people who still use CS1 or CS2. To upgrade to CS4, skipping previous ones, you have until February 28 (tomorrow, as I write this), to get the same price as those who paid for the CS3 upgrade.
After February 28, you have to pay $200 more to leapfrog to CS4, when the upgrade cost moves to $699 (Standard) or $799 (Premium). So if you think you're probably going to upgrade to CS4 sometime this year, it would behoove you to do so now, even if you don't install it for a while.
There are all sorts of permutations on upgrade prices (for example, you can still upgrade from a single product to the entire suite for something like $799), so please check the Adobe site for actual final figures before waving this article in your boss's face and yelling "let's go! let's go! let's go!"
The page on the Introductory Upgrade offer (the one that expires 2/28) is here:
http://www.adobe.com/special/up2suite/?promoid=EHEOL
For every single price permutation for your country, go to http://adobe.com and click on the Store link in the navigation bar.
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Handy Em Chart for Web Designers
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Professional web designers do a lot of translating. Not language translating, but translating a "look and feel" Photoshop, Illustrator or InDesign web page design into something a web browser would understand.
So they do a lot of measuring with pixel rulers -- how many pixels wide is this sidebar? how many pixels between the bottom of the headline and the top of the body copy? and so on -- and then include those measures in the CSS, the style sheets that do the web page formatting.
The problem is that if you specify actual pixel measures for text attributes in CSS, you end up with a fragile design, one that's easily broken by any user who makes the text larger or smaller by pressing Command/Ctrl-plus or minus. (Try it yourself on a few web pages.)
The solution, as most CSS 101 courses teach, is to use a variable spacing unit, the Em, instead of pixels. Ems are expressed in the CSS as a decimal amount: 1.5 Em, .25 Em, and so on. (In web design, a single Em -- 1.0 Em -- is the height of the text. If the text is 16 pixels., an Em is 16 pixels.)
Using Ems instead of absolute pixel measures for something like linespacing (leading, in print-ese) or padding makes the web page layout flexible. If a user increases the text size, the Em percentages increase proportionately.
The concept is explained in many fine books and tutorials, but I'm especially fond of the article that UK web designer Jon Tan posted a couple years ago on his blog:
The Incredible Em & Elastic Layouts
http://tr.im/elastic
Okay, so back to the translating. You're looking an Illustrator rendering of a home page design. The designer spaced out the body text (14 pts) paragraphs by 22 pts (space above = 22 points), a little more air than the default of a single empty line. To translate that to an elastic CSS layout, you have to figure out how much 22 pts is in relation to 14 pts, in Ems. It's one-point-something.
So you can either haul out the calculator, or you can use an incredibly useful Em chart created by web developer/designer Andy Ford of Aloe Studios and Blue River Interactive Group.
You can view the EmChart demo here:
http://aloestudios.com/tools/emchart/
Or read the explanation and download the chart here:
http://aloestudios.com/code/emchart/
Hope this helps save some brain cells out there!
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DesignGeek (tm) is a free monthly publication written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion, a cross-media designer and authorized Adobe and Quark training provider. She owns Seneca Design & Training, Inc. in Chicago, Illinois (http://www.senecadesign.com).
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