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October 24, 2004
What Adobe Acrobat Can't Do
You can fill a very large book with all the amazing features offered by Adobe Acrobat 6. And many people have. Which is why it's often surprising and annoying what it CAN'T do.
Shaké Hagopian, the Legal Information & Research Officer in the CN Law Department, wrote to me asking if I knew how to cut and paste a list of bookmarks from a PDF file. Hmm, that seems pretty basic, there must be a way to do that. But no, apparently not. After we both researched this question on the web, Shaké confirmed with Adobe that there is no way to accomplish this simple task using the standard edition.
In the course of researching Shaké's question , I found a PDF for Lawyers article on how to print bookmarks using 5.0. Printing bookmarks, now that's another task that I would think would be useful. But the fix doesn't work in 6.0 standard edition, though perhaps the $99 plug-in would. But wait, didn't we just pay a fairly hefty sum for Adobe Acrobat Standard??
My most recent stumper involved combining multiple PDF files into one, 84 of them to be exact, all court filings. Combining the files is easy, but creating bookmarks to all 84 documents isn't my idea of a good time. What would make it easier? How about automatically creating bookmarks for each file, using the file name. Can Adobe Acrobat do that? Not as far as I can tell though it can do what seems to me to be a more difficult task of creating bookmarks from Word files. In the meantime, my email on the Adobe Acrobat support forum to confirm that this can't be done is languishing unanswered. And again, I was able to find a couple of utilities that can do the job, at an additional cost.
No wonder there are so many plug-ins available for Adobe Acrobat!
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