Adobe Acrobat (aka Adobe)
Acrobat is the standard application that is used for viewing and editing pdfs. You may have at some point in your life come across Adobe Acrobat Reader, and maybe have even been confused by a website saying you might need Acrobat Reader to view a pdf that you’re downloading. Acrobat Reader is the free version of Acrobat Pro, which we have and use, cause we’re pros.
Adobe is the company that makes Acrobat, but yes, most of us call Acrobat Adobe. I call it Acrobat, because I am sensitive to language, but it does make me feel a little obstinate sometimes because I am also sensitive to sociolinguistic contexts.
What is a pdf?
(I realize this may not be a question anyone is actually asking.)
I’ve never found the google definitions of pdf to be meaningful for me. It stands for portable document format. I don’t really know what portable is supposed to mean here, and ok, so it’s a format. Document is probably the most useful way to think of it. Pdfs are kind of the default format for documents (like analogous to paper) these days, like mp3 for music, mp4 for video, jpg (jpeg) for pictures, etc…
Pdfs can be opened with a variety of applications. On Windows, Adobe Acrobat is the most common one, but there are others. Browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge can also open pdfs — they cannot be used, however, to edit pdfs. Windows opens pdfs with Microsoft Edge by default, so you may have run into that here or there on some computers.
Mac users should be familiar with Preview, the application that opens pdfs on Macs. Preview has a few basic editing functions, but is not a proper pdf editing application. Adobe Acrobat is not available for Macs; there are good pdf editing applications (not free), but using Acrobat on an office computer is recommended.
Working with pdfs - Basics
Creating pdfs
We generally don’t create pdfs from scratch, but any kind of file that can be printed (Word document, picture, web page, etc.) can be made into a pdf.
A common way to do this is to go to print the file, and then select Adobe PDF as the printer. You will get a save dialog asking you to choose a location to save the pdf to — note, sometimes the save dialog box gets hidden behind other windows. Really annoying. You can click on the icon for the save dialog box in the taskbar to bring it up.
You can also convert a printable file to pdf in Windows by right clicking on it and clicking Covert to Adobe PDF.
Combining documents
You can combine multiple pdfs into a single pdf. This can be useful if say, you want to skim through or search a bunch of documents without opening each of them separately. It’s also useful for printing a bunch of pdfs all at once.
To combine pdfs, select the files you want to combine, right click on the set (just right click on on one of the highlighted files), and click combine…
There are two combine options you should be aware of - Binder and Portfolio. Acrobat installs with Binder as the default option, but once you pick one or the other, it stays that way until you change it.
Binder
This is the intuitive version, where it makes one document that is all the pages from the combined files. It also by default very conveniently makes bookmarks for the first page of each of the combined files.
Portfolio (for printing)
The Portfolio option can be found as a check mark in the box that pops up if you click the gear button in the combine files view.
It makes like a pdf that’s a container of a bunch of pdfs which I have no idea what that would be useful for other than what we always use it for - printing.
If you double side print a Binder combined pdf, you may end up with some first pages of documents on the backside of a sheet, which can be inconvenient. (I’m ashamed at the number of hours of my life I for a time wasted in my ignorance inserting blank even pages into a combined pdf.)
When you print Portfolio combined pdfs, you can double side and each separate document you combined will be a front side of the paper!
And you can tell the printer to staple each document separately! If you are in the Manhattan office, you can put blue sheets (to make, um, binders) with the fancy special printers!
Combining non pdf documents
You can combine pdfs along with non pdf documents, or multiple non pdf documents, into one pdf, either Binder or Portfolio style. Acrobat will convert the non pdf documents.
This is mostly useful if you wanna include like pictures and Word documents, for example. Less useful for say an Excel spreadsheet, which for what it’s worth, can be pdf converted (and can be work fine if properly formatted). Does not work at all for video or audio.
Organizing Pages Insert, Extract, Split
Once you have an open pdf document, you can insert additional pages ou can also do different permutations of the reverse of combining, like extract whatever pages you want from a document, so you have a file that is just extracted pages, or one that is the original minus the extracted pages, or both! You can also split documents into two or more sections.
We’ll come back to more details on that later. These functions are things you’d do with an existing document or an open document that you created. For now let’s go over some more basics of once you