Recently in PDF & Adobe Acrobat Category

The meta-data in a Word document can tell others more than you really want them to know. Tracked changes are a perfect example; especially in a legal environment, you may not want to tip your hand by letting others see edited or deleted text. Microsoft offers new tools in Word 2003 to help remove metadata, but according to a Cnet article, they don't go far enough.

You might think that converting a Word document to PDF would automatically remove all such things, but some information may still be passed along, depending upon your settings, so while such a conversion might help, it only does part of the job. Even the government has had difficulties with this concept, releasing PDF documents with easily viewed confidential data. As a result, the National Security Agency has provided step by step instructions designed to avoid such gaffes in their Document on Redaction.

PDF files are considered to be fairly innocuous. They're used extensively in organizations big and small, and typically don't contain viruses or spyware. But with the recent introduction of Adobe Policy Server and a new product called Map-Bot, creators of content CAN monitor and/or control PDFs once they've been distributed.

Adobe's Policy Server "lets a PDF document's creator set policies determining who can view a document and whether the recipient can modify, copy, print, or forward the document." (InfoWorld, Adobe's Policy Server tightens document privacy, Jan. 5, 2005) According to Are Your PDFs Spying on You? (PC Magazine, June 28, 2005), Map-Bot "can force users to be connected to the Web in order to read the documents. It can track who's e-mailing PDFs to whom and what they're reading - in real time."

Publishers are likely to take to this technology for obvious reasons. On the bright side, they may be more willing to distribute their publications electronically via PDF if they know they can control or at least monitor, who sees it. That can mean faster delivery of a product that looks just like the print version.

And the current approach being used by some publishers such as "The Deal", leaves something to be desired. Subscribers to The Daily Deal Digital, a complete PDF of the Daily Deal, are now required to install a utility called the Unsealer, from Sealed Media, which tracks how many different computers are used to view that file. If a subscriber passes their copy along to 10 people, the The Deal will know about it.

Cisti's Document Delivery Service uses FileOpen Web Publisher to limit the number of times a document subject to copyright restrictions can be viewed and printed.

The problem is, how many utilities do YOU want to install on your computer. Especially in a networked environment, such programs can have unintended consequences, or you may not be allowed to install them at all.

Since Map-Bot leaves no software behind it may provide a better approach for copy protection. But you should be aware that content providers may have more information about how you're using their content than you might have thought.

I like using PDF to package my research results. It's easy to deliver via email and I can use bookmarks and annotation tools without disfiguring the original. Using Adobe Acrobat I can combine search results from other resources on the web, and even incorporate scanned items. Now I just want the major online services to make things even easier for me.

I recently saw a demo of Adobe Acrobat 7.0, and I'm happy to announce that it now creates bookmarks automatically based on the file name when you combine files. Yey! This new feature was high on my wish list, and will meet what I expect is a very common need.

In 6.0, if you wanted to append all of the citing cases to a brief or other document, you had no choice but to create each bookmark manually by finding the first page of each case, then adding the bookmark. With a large number of documents this process is tedious and time-consuming. But if you're using version 7.0, bookmarks for each case will be automatically created. If you've had the foresight to name your files well, your work will be done. If not, it's fairly easy to click on each bookmark, and rename them appropriately. That's much easier than starting from scratch!

I still can't see any option to print or otherwise save bookmarks, though! I guess we can't have everything.

By the way, the Lawyer's Guide to Adobe Acrobat is now out and available. I haven't read it yet, but it comes highly recommended from a number of reliable sources.

I guess it had to happen. A security hole was discovered in Adobe Acrobat Reader that could potentially "allow an attacker to execute malicious code on a user's system via a PDF file distributed via e-mail." The bug effects version 6.0.2, and possibly earlier versions of the Reader.

The problem can be avoided by installing an updated version of Adobe Reader, and it just so happens that version 7.0 is available. Among the enhancements in Adobe Reader 7.0 (note that it's no longer called "Adobe Acrobat Reader") are:

- faster loading time, something I'm sure we'll all appreciate.
- ability to fill in interactive forms
- commenting capability can be offered on documents created in Adobe Acrobat 7.0
- improved searching

If you'd rather stick with version 6, then at least update to 6.0.3 to avoid any unpleasantness.

It seems like only yesterday that Adobe Acrobat 6.0 was released. In fact, it was shipped mid-2003. My, my, software ages quickly these days! Adobe announced last week that version 7.0 will be released by the end of the year. Both PlanetPDF and PDFZone have already reviewed the new functionality offered by 7.0.

Interesting...you'll be able to use Acrobat 7.0 to subscribe to RSS feeds using the "Tracker" tool. This I've got to see! But unfortunately the only mention I could find of this particular feature was in the first part of the Planet PDF Product Tour. It goes without saying that it will be a simple matter to convert those RSS feeds to PDF. It's unclear whether both Standard and Professional will include the Tracker tool.

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??

There have been reports of problems with the new 6.0 Adobe Acrobat Reader. I first spotted a complaint from John Dvorak (PC Magazine, September 7, 2004) , but then, he's always complaining about something! I paid more attention when I recently saw comments on Web4Lib .

At the AALL exhibit hall, I picked up at some information about CISTI's document delivery service and their new Secure Desktop Delivery. In order to receive your orders electronically, you register with CISTI, download the SDD plugin, and you're good to go; they can then send your documents to you electronically as PDF files. But these aren't just any PDF files. Due to copyright concerns, CISTI delivers secure PDFs which limit the number of times you can print and view the document. It's fairly draconian...you're allowed to view and/or print the document once and only once.

The "copyright" question came up after my Adobe Acrobat session at AALL. How do you keep people from distributing the PDF to everyone and their brother, possibly violating copyright law? After all, the same copyright issues apply to the electronic version as apply to the hard copy research results.

Many libraries use a rubber stamp for photocopied articles that says: "This material may be protected by copyright law (Title 17 U.S. Code)." (See "Copyright & Fair Use - Library Photocopying" from Stanford University.) You can do the same thing for your PDF file in Adobe Acrobat 6.0 using the stamp tool.

I'm back from the American Association of Law Libraries Conference (AALL) in Boston! I thoroughly enjoyed it, and will be posting on several new products and announcements from the exhibit hall. I want to thank everyone who attended my session, "Reaching the Global Patron: Packaging Your Research with Adobe Acrobat 6.0," on Wednesday. It was one of the last sessions of the conference, and I was pleased to see there were still many hardy souls out there who were attending programs up to the very end.

As promised, I've posted my Powerpoint and the handout which includes the Adobe Acrobat 6.0 Quick Reference Guide.

I'll be giving a presentation in July at the American Association on Law Libraries conference about Adobe Acrobat, similar to what I did last year at Internet Librarian. But I'm in a quandary regarding which version to show, 5.0 or 6.0. So do me a favor, take this month's LawLibTech poll and let me know what version, if any, you have on your desktop. You'll find the poll on the right-hand side of the front page.

Confused about the differences between Adobe Acrobat's free reader and the software? Then take a look at Dennis Kennedy's Frequently Asked Questions on Adobe Acrobat and PDF for Lawyers.

June 27, 2004 - Thanks to those who answered the survey! The results are...

Sometimes I blog because I have something to say on a topic, sometimes because I find a useful piece of information that I want to pass along, and sometimes I use this blog as a personal knowledgebase so I can find pertinent articles, blog entries or web pages at a later date. Just so you know, this entry falls into the third category.

Dennis Kennedy recently wrote an an article on PDF for Law Practice Today that contains a nice concise list of web resources relating to the use of PDF that I want to be able to find again in the future!
[via PDF for Lawyers]

There are two types of PDF files. One type is a scanned image of a document, simply a picture of it, if you will. You can read the text when viewing it, but the computer can't. The other type contains text that is readable by the computer. These kinds of files are typically created from text files, such as a Word document, rather than scanned. In this case, the text is captured along with the image.

If you're viewing a PDF file such as a court document, and don't know which kind of file it is, use the find feature to locate a word that you know is there to see if Adobe Acrobat can recognize it. If not, you're looking at an image.

What if you have an image-only file and need to search the document, or otherwise want the computer to recognize the text contained in the image? Perhaps you'd like to extract the citations using Checkcite or Westcheck. In order to do that, you need to OCR the document. Lucky for you Dave Fishel has written two tutorials to help you out, OCR Tutorial for Acrobat 4 and 5 and OCR Tutorial for Acrobat 6. I'm sure glad PDF for Lawyers is back!

Darlene Fichter's Internet Librarian presentation on tools for web development listed a variety of handy and useful utilities. I've already told you about ieSpell.

Also included were a couple of interesting PDF tools.

I just got back from Internet Librarian 2003 in beautiful Monterey. It was a great conference. More details will follow. In the meantime, here's a link to my presentation and handout on Delivering Research Results Electronically using Adobe Acrobat.