Subtitles of the Movie

The way I set up this training series is that before I actually got into each program, I would have a little segment explaining what the program is. So before the section on Adobe Bridge, we are going to talk about what is Bridge. And so on and so forth. So, now is the part of the training where I'm suppose to say, "What is Acrobat?" And boy, that is kind of a tough question. I'm not really exactly sure how to describe what Adobe Acrobat is. Adobe Acrobat is the ultimate document format program. The ultimate document format that it supports is the PDF format or Portable Document Format. And PDF as it's abbreviated, is probably the most powerful document format ever created. Using a PDF, we can lock users out of our documents. That is the only document that I'm aware of that you can actually use it to prevent printing. So someone might look at your document and they might not be able to print it. You might set that up as a permission. As a security point inside of Acrobat that they can't print your document. And also, interestingly enough, Adobe Acrobat also has the most powerful print capabilities of any program in the entire creative suite and one of the most powerful print programs ever. It is quickly becoming the standard for professional print production all around the world. We can also put 3D images inside of our PDF files and rotate around them in 3D. We can also imbed video and images into our PDFs. So you can see a little bit of why it's so difficult for me to explain such a versatile powerful tool such as Acrobat. Another really interesting quirk about Acrobat is that we don't create documents inside of Acrobat, we only use Acrobat to adjust PDFs, to add comments or other type of things to PDF. Maybe we will assemble multiple documents into one big, multi-page PDF, but we don't actually start out our documents in PDF. It's not made for that. So oftentimes my students will say, okay, well, what is the difference between Word and Acrobat, which one should I use to create my documents? And that is like saying, "Well, should I eat this apple or this Buick?" I mean, it doesn't make any sense. It's a totally unrelated program from Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is what we use to create the documents and then we convert that over to Acrobat. And the benefit of doing that is that what you see with your PDF is what you get. Often times, if you send your Doc. file, your Microsoft Word file onto another person, what they are seeing is completely different than what you initiated. But with PDF, you are almost guaranteed that what you see is what the end user will see as well. And not only that, but it's an extremely common file format. All browsers support it now and it's a very common way, a standard way, for transferring data. Now, just a couple quick notes before we get started about Acrobat. There are a few versions of Acrobat. There is the Adobe Reader, for example, which is primarily used to read and navigate through PDF documents. There is also Acrobat 7 Standard, which allows you to author, do some authoring with PDF documents, but it doesn't give you the ultimate capabilities that Acrobat is really capable of. Acrobat 7 Professional does. It opens up that entire door to you. Now, one other quick note. The training actually is on Acrobat 7, but I'm going to be using Acrobat 8, which has just been released. I'm an Adobe beta tester and so I have the next version of all the software installed in my computer and I kind of have to do that. So, it kind of wiped out my Acrobat 7 Professional as I was going through this training. So, I will be using 8, but I won't be using any of the features specific to Acrobat 8. So it will kind of be a little preview, a teaser, of what is to come. Now the first thing we are going to get into is that Acrobat looks a little bit different than the other Adobe applications we have been using. So, let's go ahead and get talking about Acrobat, starting first with it's weird interface.