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Subject:RE: Acrobat Pro versus Acrobat Standard? From:"Elissa K. Miller" <emiller -at- doubleknot -dot- com> To:"'Jim'" <jameswitkin -at- gmail -dot- com>, "'techwr-l'" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com> Date:Tue, 23 Jun 2015 12:45:21 -0700
FWIW, you can do all of these things within Word itself in Save and Send -
Create PDF/XPS Document. (At least you can on Windows; I don't know about
Mac.) You can choose whether to create bookmarks from headings or from
Word-defined bookmarks. The feature automatically retains the links from the
TOC to the various pages, and links to external sites.
I know this because my super-budget-conscious employer has a licensed copy
of Acrobat Standard 8.1 from many years ago that won't play nicely with
modern Word at all, so I can't use Acrobat to create the initial PDF. The
built-in PDF creator in Word does everything I need. The resulting PDF file
is unnecessarily large, but I am happy that it works at all.
Because I have no other choice, my steps are:
1. Set up the original Word document with headings.
2. Create the TOC in Word.
3. Save as a PDF using headings as bookmarks. The internal links in the TOC
work, any links to outside sites work, and the heading levels are all set up
nicely, and hierarchically, as PDF bookmarks.
4. Open the resulting file with my elderly version of Acrobat Standard 8.
5. Add the front matter that needs to be in the doc. I write them in Word
and save them to PDF using CutePDF Writer because it makes nice, small PDFs
(but won't preserve headings as bookmarks, or I'd use it for everything).
6. Set the document to open with the Bookmarks panel showing so readers will
start off with decent navigation.
7. Assign numbering to sections so the front matter is numbered as i-iii and
the "real" first page of content is numbered as page 1, even if it's
actually the sixth page in the PDF document.
8. Set the page to be displayed when the document is opened.
9.Save everything and be happy that Standard 8 still does, more or less,
what I need it to do except creating the original PDF from Word (it dies
whether I choose Acrobat as the printer in Word, use the very old Acrobat
plug-in, or start in Acrobat and tell it to turn the Word file into a PDF.)
I read everyone's posts about using modern, industry-standard tools with
longing. I'm pretty much living and working in 2006. Small idiosyncratic
companies are...interesting, and I would certainly prefer to keep my skills
current, but there are good reasons for me to stay where I am.
Regards,
Elissa
-----Original Message-----
From: techwr-l-bounces+emiller=doubleknot -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com
[mailto:techwr-l-bounces+emiller=doubleknot -dot- com -at- lists -dot- techwr-l -dot- com] On
Behalf Of Jim
Sent: Tuesday, June 23, 2015 11:34 AM
To: techwr-l
Subject: Acrobat Pro versus Acrobat Standard?
Anyone familiar with the major differences between these two versions of
Acrobat?
Primarily, I want to create PDFs from Word documents with these features:
1) Retain hyperlinks from the Word document (both navigational hyperlinks to
go to another part of the file and external links to go to web pages)
2) Retain the hyperlink capability for the TOC (i.e. click on section
heading or page number in the TOC and go to that page in the PDF)
3) Ability to convert Word style headings (Heading 1, Heading 2, etc) to PDF
bookmarks. With bookmarks, the reader gets a view of the document's TOC in
the sidebar of the PDF viewer no matter where they are in the document.
The user can click on the bookmarks and go to that section of the PDF.
If I can do all these things with Acrobat Standard, I would rather not spend
the extra money for the Pro version. Advice?
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