Subtitles of the Movie

OK. I do a lot of web design, I do a lot of print design, I do a lot with html and with CSS and so on and I got wondering may years ago, probably about four, five years ago, I got wondering if there would be a way to hook Acrobat up in such a way so that it could connect to an email address. You know when you're surfing around on the web and you click on a link and your web browser automatically triggers your email program and creates a brand-new blank email to send back to the website or send back to the company. Well, that's something called a mail-to link in web design circles, anyway, and I got wondering if there was a way to do this in Acrobat. Now, what I'm going to show you here, I'd never seen this in any book. I've never seen this in any tutorial before. But I figured out a way to do it and I love showing it. Whenever I have an opportunity to show this, I definitely show it because it's extremely cool and very easy to pull off. So in other words, inside Acrobat here, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a bookmark that when clicked launches the user's email program and automatically creates a brand-new email that's going to get sent back to us. So here's what I'm going to do. Once again, inside the Bookmarks Panel, I'm going to start off by creating a brand-new bookmark. You can call this guy whatever you want. You can call it Email Us or Contact Us or Request Information or whatever you want. I'm going to call this Contact Us. Alright, great. Now, I'm going to right click on this guy, just as before. I'll head down to Properties. I'll head to the Actions Tab here and as before I'm going to get rid of this Go to a Page in This Document, delete that guy out. Now, for the select action. Now, you'll notice in this list there's no mention of hooking up to an email address or sending an email or anything like that. But here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to use the guy that we just finished taking a look at; Open a Web Link. Now, that seems kind of unlikely but follow me along here. I'm going to choose Open a Web Link and then I'll click on Add. Alright. Now, it's inside this URL Dialog Box where we're actually going to hook up to our email address. So here's what you need to type in. This is actually a little bit of coding, but don't feel intimated because it's very, very simple. It's very easy. All I'm going to do is I'm going to type in M-a-i-l-t-o full colon. In other words, Mail To full colon. M-a-i-l-t-o full colon. That's it. After the full colon, no spaces, type in your email address. Whatever email you want. OK. Perfect. You want to know something? That's it. That's all you need to do. So just M-a-i-l-t-o full colon, your email address, that's it. Now, if we were to go and test this guy out, he would definitely work. But you know what? Before we go and test him out, I got to throw a little bit of mustard on top because this is too simple. I want to give you a little bit more here. So not only will we get Acrobat to trigger our email client, but I also want to force the subject line of that email. How do you do that? Again, it's very, very simple. Directly after your email address, after the.com or the .NET or the .ca or whatever you have there, type in a question mark. So no spaces, a question mark, subject, type in the word subject and then type in an equal sign. So question mark, subject, equals. No spaces. After the equals sign, type in whatever subject line you want. So after the equals sign is the only spot in this string where you can have spaces. So whatever subject line you want. Maybe I'll type in here requesting more information. It would help if I could spell. About your products. Whatever you like there. OK, so you can break this string down into very small components. We have the mail to and the full colon. We have the email address. We have the questions mark subject equals and then after that we have whatever subject line we want. OK. Are you ready to see it in action? It's pretty darn cool stuff. I hope you're liking this. I can click on OK. I'm going to click on OK again, cross your fingers and click on your Bookmark Icon. Alright. Now, on the Mac here at least, MacMail fires up and creates a brand-new email for me. Probably on your end you might have Outlook or you might have Entourage or who knows. But there's my email address that I specified and there's the subject line that I specified. That is probably the coolest thing that I figured out inside Acrobat. And again, I just sort of figured it out on my own one day. I never saw this in a tutorial or in a book. I just kind of tried it and I was blown away that it actually worked. So I hope you like this. I hope you can make use of this. It's extremely cool stuff and you know, you can do more with this. You could force a cc address if you wanted to, a bcc address. You can even force part of the body. If you're interested in learning this stuff, just hop onto Google and do a search for Mailto, that M-a-i-l-t-o and you'll find all kinds of neat things that you can do. Anyway, there we go. There's a look at creating interactive bookmarks inside Acrobat. Hope you enjoyed.