Subtitles of the Movie

Now, I suppose a great place to start off before we actually get into working inside Acrobat and editing our files and so on is to have a discussion on the Acrobat file format itself, PDF, which stands for Portable Document Format, by the way. The big question is why would we even use PDF? Why even bother? Why not just send, instead of sending a PDF file, why not send the original Word document or why not send the original Excel spreadsheet or whatever the case may be. Well, you might already be privy to some of this information. This could be old news for you but I thought it would be important to sort of start things off with a discussion here on the PDF file format. So one of the big reasons why I think a lot of people are using PDF is they assume or they think that the PDF file format is secure and you know, it isn't and we're going to be talking about this in more detail in just a little bit. I'm going to save that discussion for now but I think one of the big reasons though too for using the PDF file format is because it's a universal file format. It's cross-platform. I'm on a Macintosh here. If you're on a Macintosh or on a Windows machine or maybe a Linux box or whatever the heck you have, you can exchange PDF files seamlessly between these operating systems. Not only that but they're great in terms of their portability. You can email them. They're often small enough that you can email them. You can post them online. So there's this universal aspect to PDF files. Let me show you something else here as well. I've got my InDesign Layout, the original InDesign Layout for the PDF file that I just had on screen opened up here and here's a situation that I find myself in all the time. Let's say for example that you're my client and I'm putting together this layout for you. Well, you're on a Windows machine because you work in the business world and I'm on a Mac because I'm a design-y, print guy and I've laid everything out here for you and I'm ready to show you what I have. How can I show you what I've done without, you know, printing out a hard copy and faxing it to you. Well, that's no good. I would much rather send you an electronic version of what I have and the PDF file format is a great tool for this type of a situation. So I could maybe save this out as JPEG, but maybe you don't know this but JPEGs only support one page. You can't have multiple pages inside a JPEG. But with PDF I can. So that's fantastic. So I would convert this file to a PDF file and I'll show you how to do that a little bit later on. And, of course, what I see inside Acrobat in terms of the PDF file, which was generated off of that InDesign Layer, is pretty much exactly what I would see if I was to print this out as a hard copy. Now, that's not a hundred percent true but that is something that you can definitely adhere to to a fair degree. The other thing too about the PDF file format, and this starts to get into a region that not a whole lot of people know about, is there's this whole interactive side to Acrobat where I could take a document like this and I could start setting up hyperlinks, for example. Maybe I have some hyperlinks inside the main text of my file here or here's a great example. I have sort of a miniature table of contents for this chapter here and I can make these items clickable and that would take the user to those locations inside the file. Now, this is just a very basic idea. Some other things that I could do, I could add in some audio, I could add in some video, I could create a whole interactive environment inside my PDF file. Now, on the other end of the scale, what you could is you could use the PDF file format to archive material. So I have another file here which I'm going to pop open which is just a scan of some handwritten notes. So maybe I get an email from a friend and he says, hey, do you have any information on the gold in the inflation-deflation debate. I don't know if you're into this stuff or not and I say hey, yeah, you know, I have some handwritten notes on exactly that. And he says well, can you fax it over to me? And I say, well, you know, fax machine is kind of a, what is that, from the seventeenth century or something? I don't know. But I said I'll tell you what. I'll scan this and I'll email it over to you. Or maybe I want to take some notes that I've made for myself, maybe at a conference or something and I want to scan them and archive them and I'll show you later on how you can take these scans and make them searchable so you can retrieve some of the content out of them. It's pretty cool. There's so many different uses for the PDF file format and I'm sure you've already started using some of them. But the whole idea in this training here is to open your mind to a lot of the different possibilities inside Acrobat.