My Secret Dream of Becoming a Clothing Designer

It's not something I generally advertise, but did you know that my college degree is in Home Economics? And that outside of work, I am a passionate knitting designer and long-time athlete? These things have come together recently in a way that allowed me to expand my designing beyond just my usual computer work. I recently submitted a dress design idea to a women's sportswear company and my idea gathered enough votes to go up for pre-orders.

They turned my rough sketch into a real design in print and in black, which is up for sale on the Skirt Sports website.

Skirt Sports asked me to write up a little background about the inspiration behind this dress design. In it, I share about my love of freedom of movement, being comfortable, and how that combined with my need for high-performance professional clothing. You can read the entire article here: The Brains, Beauty and Brawn Behind the Out & About Dress

How to Change the Text Size in Measurement Tool In Acrobat DC

I did a search for this topic this morning, and apparently, people have been wondering about this going back for about a decade, or whenever the Measuring Tool was added in to Acrobat. I do need to give a disclaimer that this is a kludgy workaround, and bypasses Acrobat's lack of built-in functionality for this feature. So here we go!

1. Start by opening the Measure Tool and measuring the object.

2. Next, go to your commenting tools and make a new text comment. You can use either there regular Add Text Comment tool, or the text box tool. Basically, we're just need to use one of the tools that gives us access to the text properties editing. Then using the Text Properties tool, type in the distance that Acrobat generated above when you measured your object. In this case, it is 1.5 in. Then change the font size to whatever you prefer. You can change the color as well if you like.

3. Next, select the text n the text comment you just made. Copy it.

4. Open the Comments pane. Select the distance measurement in the "Line" comment.

5. Paste in the text that you copied from the text box tool. Violá! Larger type!

Now, I wish there was a way to make this the default, but since Acrobat doesn't have text size as one of the editable properties of the measure tool, the size of the type isn't taken into consideration when you choose "Make Properties Default."

However, you can have access to edit a number of other properties of the Dimension Line, just not type size. If you need to have larger type Dimension Line type on a regular basis, I would imagine that an Acrobat scripter could easily write a script to do just that.

Edit: 9-18-918
I recently discovered a different software called BlueBeam Revu, which has much more customizable drawing markup properties, including the ability to choose the font, font size, and font color for measuring markups. Even the rectangle and callout line can have their own colors! Check out my article on Bluebeam Revu. It's an amazing program designed specifically to meet the needs of users in Architecture, Engineering, and Construction.

How to Use The Acrobat DC Highlighter Tool

Recently, Acrobat upgraded the highlighter tool so that you can highlight non-text objects. But most people aren't aware of the upgrade because it only works on scanned pages or pages with raster objects on them. Nevertheless, it's an interesting functionality. It's not quite as user-friendly as I'd like, but it's handy to be aware of. Enjoy!