Musings on the topic: "Should I Edit this PDF?"

This is discussion from the Acrobat forums, where I helped a user make PDF edits.

I'm editing a PDF. I don't have the original Word document. My client provided me with Word documents that were converted from the PDFs. I'm inserting into the main document. I have be 4 document that I am combining portions into my main document. te Word documents were so messed up that I chose to edit the main PDF. For the most part, things are going well, though much slower than if I were working in Word. I have one big issue, and a couple of smaller one. 

1. When I paste into my main document, some letters are bold, though when I try to unbold them, they don't. Usually, it's a few letters in a paragraph. Other times, it's most of the letters in a paragraph.
2. How to get a hanging indent on a numbered list. Or indenting an entire paragraph?
3. Changing a number or letter in a ordered list?
4. And, when converting to Word, is there a way to stop the text from being put in boxes. Even editing a PDF, everything is broken up into nonsensical boxes.

Thanks. Stephanie

Honestly, editing a PDF in Acrobat is rather unpredictable, to put it gently. Acrobat is great at a lot of things, but precise formatting is not one of those things. I reccomend you recreate the documents from scratch in a proper program, such as Word or InDesign, that will give you control over the formatting. But if you must just continue using Acrobat to edit the PDF, here are some things to try.

1. When getting weird bolding issues, try pasting the text first into a plain text editor. Sometimes, I even paste into the subject line of an email (as it strips out the formatting). Then I copy and paste again into whatever program I needed the text for in the first place.
2. Hanging indent: Make a separate text box for the numbered list. To indent an entire paragraph, use the Edit tool to resize the text box. It's worth noting that Acrobat doesn't treat text editing like a word processing program, where you can set precise measurements for things like indents, margins, tabs, etc., and expect to be able to use them document-wide. Think of editing in Acrobat more like each individual text box is a separate piece piece of paper, cut out and pasted onto the page. Each text box has absolutely nothing to do with the other text boxes.
   
3. To change a bullet or number in an ordered list: sometimes, Acrobat treats the bullet or number as a separate text box. You'll be able to edit the text in the hanging indent, but it won't move with the main body of the text. Again, this is another reason to create the document from scratch in Word or InDesign because Acrobat will never behave the way you want or expect when trying to edit ordered lists.
4. The boxes you're experiencing aren't form the document getting created in Word. That's just the way Acrobat handles text editing. It does it's best shot at figuring out which boxes go together. 
   

My final words of advice are to think of text editing in Acrobat like using white-out on a printed copy. If the change in your text is small enough that it can be done with white-out, then its appropriate to do that change in Acrobat. If the changes will require half the document to be whited-out, then Acrobat is not the place to make those changes. Go back to the original source document. If you don't have the original document, recreate it, or at least recreate just those pages (in your word processing tool of choice) and then replace those pages in the PDF.

Stockinette Stitch Knitting Fonts

In my career, my time is spent at the intersection of two industries, of multiple programs, and generally wherever two typically unrelated topics converge. Those areas are often of the greatest interest to me, because they remain largely unexplored. Come with me friends, as I take you on a tour of a bit of that dual existence in my life: at the intersection of multiples worlds, where knitting, font design, and graphic design software merge.

It's important to understand the reasoning behind the necessity of creating this knitting font. Upon searching for Knitting fonts online, you'll come upon a mish mash collection of cross stitch letters, letters made to look like string, and stitches that don't line up... the list of inaccurate knitted alphabets goes on and on. As a knitter, I think it's important that if you're going to design a "knitting font" that you get the details right. Most of the knitted fonts that exist don't get the details correct, and obviously made by non-knitters.

Here are some of the issues I've encountered:

1. The alphabet is actually not a font, but a vector stock art alphabet.

2. The stitches aren't curved like actual knitted stitches are. They're made of straight lines.

3. The letters are regular letter shapes, used as a clipping path for a raster image.

4. The stitches don't line up. The left and right hand side of the stitches should be on the same vertical plane. While the technique below adds visual interest, it is not representative of the true shape of knitted stitches. Plus, the stitches look like little grains of rice. This example, however, does an excellent job of incorporating both sides of the stitch into the design of the letterforms (and not chopping off one half where it is deemed unsightly).

5. The right and left side of each stitch are joined. Knitted stitches are not little hearts. Knitted stitches are actually horseshoe shaped, and mirror each other on around a vertical axis, with a little bit of space in between each half of the stitch.

5. No background stitches. When knitting letters in a design in a physical piece of knitting, they are integrated into the fabric itself, they don't float magically in the air. Hence, the need for background stitches. The background stitches are just as much part of the design as the letters themselves. While it's true that the letterforms can be used without the background stitches (as in the example below), for maximum usability, as well as accuracy in representation to a physically knitted fabric, there should be background stitches available, either as alternate characters, or as a second member of the font family.

6. Spaces not handled properly. When uses spaces in a knitted design, there are background stitches in the fabric. This font gets a some of the other technical details correct, but it makes no account for the spaces between the words. 

Knitfont

Once spaces are added, things break down. The background stitches are gone. We can work around this using some special characters and GREP Styles in InDesign, but in this particular font, the character sets don't match, and the necessary glyphs weren't made to allow the background stitches to be used. 

7. Stitches chopped off. Here in another font that makes a fair attempt at knitted stitches. Like the font above, it has no background stitches. 

Xmas Sweater Stitch

If you look closely, it's clear that the details are wrong. In the corners, the side half of the some of the stitches are chopped off. While that does make the diagonals look a little smoother, it's not technically accurate. This was obviously not designed by a knitter.

8. Incomplete character set. This is the closest one that I found to an actual knitting font. The shapes of the stitches are correct, the stitches line up, the style of the letterforms is accurate for what knitters use; it's pretty great. It's even in a style common to what a knitter would actually use when knitting names into a garment. The issues that I encountered are that it doesn't have a full character set, and there are no background stitches built into the font itself. So when using this for graphic design it must be used in conjunction with the vector background that is packaged with the font. 

Christmas Font

So why make a my own custom knitting fonts?

While I can manually create these fair isle letters in Illustrator each time I need them, it's a tedious process to do just every once in awhile. I wanted an alphabet that I can quickly use whenever I need to plan some knitted lettering. For example, I've been making family Christmas stockings for over a decade. I've lost track of how many I've made. It would be really great to just type up my name chart quickly each time I go to start a stocking, rather than get out graph paper and draw it.

By incorporating advanced typographic features like ligatures, I can have more flexibility when working with a set number of stitches. Take these stocking for example. Each name needs to fit within 28 stitches. That's why in the BAILEY and the ASHLYN stockings, the Ys are different. Bailey's name is 6 letters long. Ashlyn's name is 7 letters long and required the stitches to have tighter tracking. The Y is very closely aligned to the L in front of it. Having ligatures and alternate characters in the font allows this to happen either automatically or manually.

Kelly's Christmas Stockings

Plus, if I have these alphabets as actual fonts, I can quickly and easily typeset knitting letter charts for other knitters on my Etsy shop. I can also use these fonts to personalize my KnitSwag products.

I wanted my knitting fonts to meet the following criteria:

• Accurate curves (to reflect the way the yarn forms each stitch)
• Stitches aligned to a grid (not offset in any way)
• Proper gauge (not too horizontally or vertically compressed). They should be about a .67 height to width ratio.
• Incorporate the use of ligatures so that character placement can be adjusted to fit a set number of stitches
• Available in different number of stitches high, in order to be used for different types of projects
• Available in both Regular and Bold versions
• Uses a second font with each font family, for background stitches
• Has a complete character set, including punctuation, numbers, and most special characters

How I made the fonts

I used Adobe InDesign and IndyFont Pro to create my custom knitting fonts. IndyFont Pro is a dream come true! It lets me use the software that I know and love to create fonts. The free version lets you create a single character (for bullets), but the Pro version lets you create full character sets. It's well documented, and the user manual is one of the best I've ever seen!

So far I've created two versions of stockinette stitch fair isle knitting fonts: an 8 stitch high and an 11 stitch high version. They are the only knitting fonts of their kind! I'll be designing more in the coming weeks. Would you like to have a custom name chart in these fonts? Head on over to my Etsy shop and I'll set you set up! I made these fair isle alphabets with specifically with knitters in mind.

A Workaround For Numbering Table Columns

If you’ve ever tried to use numbering in a table, you’re likely familiar with the behavior of how InDesign determines where to place the numbers. As demonstrated in this article, you’ll see that InDesign will scan the table from left to right and then from top to bottom and apply the numbering this way.

But what if you want the numbers to be assigned from top-to-bottom and the left to right? It’s possible, but not inside of a table. With Western languages, text flows from top to bottom, and right to left. So what we need to do is construct our numbered list in a way that matches that flow. And then add the borders.

Read the entire article at InDesign Secrets.

Why Won't InDesign Sample Scripts work in InDesign 2019?

I encountered a strange issue recently. I was creating a business card imposition in InDesign. I opened the Scripts panel, and then ran CropMarks.applescript. Nothing happened.

My compute seemingly locked up for a moment, but no crop marks appeared. After a  minute or so of investigation, I realized that InDesign 2018 had launched. But I was using InDesign 2019...

I went back to InDesign 2018, and it displayed the following dialog box:

It turns out that when InDesign 2019 was shipped, no one at Adobe had changed the hard-coded application version in the sample Applescripts. 

The workaround is that you simply need to change them to be "2019" instead of "2018." Alternatively, you can use the corresponding sample javascripts in the Samples folder for the job.

MoreInfo Improves Notes, Conditional Text, Tracked Changes and More

Much of my workflow involves obscure, little understood technical features of InDesign. Two of the features I use the most are Conditional Text and Notes. They were introduced many years ago and haven’t been improved since then. However, from time to time, independent developers decide to tackle some of the challenges faced by users of these obscure features. And for these developers I am extremely grateful! In this post I’d like to introduce you to a new commercial plug-in called MoreInfo by Kerntiff Publishing Systems. MoreInfo combines the information from several features and displays it all in one handy spot. With MoreInfo, you can see, well, more info, on conditional text, notes, tracked changes, overset text, and index entries.

MoreInfo Panel

Read the entire article at InDesign Secrets.

Caution, Warning, and Danger Styles

In my work as a technical publisher, my documents use quite a few "Cautions." I see requests on the Adobe forums about this from time to time, so I thought I would share my method for formatting these styles.

There are a number of ways to set these up, including tables, but I have found that tables can prove a bit cumbersome. I've decided to incorporate the use of InDesign Paragraph Shading and Paragraph border settings. Disclaimer: These features were introduced in InDesign CC 2018. If you open this file in an earlier version of InDesign, it will not behave as expected.

Because I like my manuals to have plenty of white space, with nice wide margins, these styles are set up to have a large left indent. Here are some of the features of these styles:

• Both Warning and Danger styles are set up based on Caution, so if you need to make any adjustments for the spacing or font, you just have to do it in one place.
• The CAUTION, WARNING, and DANGER text auto-populates (they utilize the bullet feature to accomplish this).
• The little triangle dings are vector anchored objects, so they are easily editable. 
• The dings each have their own object style, so they sit in the correct spot based on which paragraph style uses them. "WARNING" is  longer than "DANGER", so the triangle ding sits a little farther to the left.
• The CAUTION TEXT is set up as a "Next style".
• Caution Text displays borders even when over over threaded frames.
• All styles auto fit the width of the frame.

Download the IDML file here.

Caution Styles

Caution: Paragraph Shading

Caution: Paragraph Borders

Caution Text: Paragraph Borders

Caution Text works over threaded frames and auto resizes to frame width

Making Hidden Characters More Subtle

As InDesign users, it’s very important to have total control of our typography. In order to do this, we need to pay just as much attention to the invisible characters as we do the visible characters.
Each hidden character has the potential to add increase spacing in potentially every direction. For paragraphs: this could be Space Before, Space After, Leading, etc. And certain characters offer all sorts of options: em spaces, en spaces, figure spaces, regular tabs, right-indent tabs, etc.

Things may look fine on the surface, but look what is hiding underneath!

If you feel that hidden characters are too distracting and interfere with your designing, follow the link below to learn how you can make them more subtle.

Read the entire article at InDesign Secrets: Making Hidden Characters More Subtle

Quick and Dirty Page Imposition Using Only Acrobat

Today I was working on a 1-up half page flyer of which I need to print multiple copies. Normally, I would go into InDesign and manually impose the document 2-up and then export a new PDF. But I wanted to see if I could get an acceptable result right within Acrobat. The following screenshots are of the Thumbnails panel, but you can achieve the same thing using the Organize Pages tool.

Thumbnails Panel: 1 page

Much like in the other Adobe programs, if you hold down and Option and drag, you will duplicate the object. In this case, I held down Option while dragging the thumbnail. Now I've duplicated page 1. Read more about that technique here.

Thumbnails Panel: 2 pages

Next, go to the Print dialog box and choose the "Multiple" tab. This will only work if you have more than one page. That's why I had to duplicate page 1, so that Acrobat would actually have multiple pages to put together on the same page.

Print Dialog Box: Multiple Tab

You can also make a four up imposition using the same method. Duplicate pages 1 and 2 again, to get four of the same pages. Then choose 4 up per page.

Print Dialog Box: Print four up!

Now, remember that the borders won't be exact all the way around, so this imposition method won't be suitable for all applications. But if you just need to take a flyer and quickly print out multiple on a page, this can be a great tool. Also note that this trick won't work in Adobe Reader, because it requires page editing.

Use Replace Document Colors to Help Distinguish Various Files in Acrobat

In a previous post, I shared how to use page color to help distinguish various files. It is a simple trick easily accomplished in InDesign.

But what if you need the same thing, but you're working in Acrobat? Easy!

Simply go to Preferences > Accessibility > and Choose "Replace Document Colors". You can choose from one of four preset color schemes, or choose your own custom colors. Here I have simply changed preference to display the background in a light yellow.

Document Colors Replaced

It's important to note that this is an application-wide setting. So if you change it here, Acrobat will display all of your PDFs this way. If you still need to be able to view some of your PDFs in their default colors, and simply have one of them display tinted, you can open one PDF in Reader and the other in Acrobat.

Open one PDF in Reader and the other in Acrobat

But there's more to this feature than meets the eye! Acrobat has four built-in high contrast color choices.

High Contrast Color Choices

Green Text on Black

Yellow Text on Black

White Text on Black

Black Text on White

It would be wise to experiment and see which settings work best for your document, In the above images, I had both "Only change the color of black text or line art" selected. That meant the the red text didn't get change. And neither did the black bulldog, even when the surrounding background was changed to black. Here are some various combinations for changing the colors.

No Options chosen

Option 1 chosen

Options 1 and 2 Chosen

Option 2 chosen

Which settings you need will be determined by how your document was constructed. Experiment and see what works best for you!

Understanding the Interchangeability of PDF Comments Across Adobe Programs: Part 2

In my previous article, I shared a bit how Notes transfer between Acrobat and Photoshop. When a document in Photoshop is saved as PDF, notes created in Photoshop actually appear in Acrobat. The comment author name in from Acrobat gets populated into the author name in the Photoshop Notes panel.

Interestingly, Photoshop only imports PDF sticky notes, not text correction markups or drawing annotations. Acrobat does provide a somewhat helpful warning. "The PDF document contains annotation types that are not supported by Photoshop. These annotations will be ignored."

That message isn't completely clear in what it will do to your Acrobat PDF annotations. Photoshop will only display Sticky Notes; nothing else. Those are the only type of annotation that is interchangeable between Photoshop and Acrobat. The message would be more accurate if it said "deleted" instead of "ignored."

Let's explore the difference of Acrobat notes and Photoshop Notes, and see who one is better suited for which purpose.  This is a photograph that requires me to use the Notes in both programs. This electrical panel has about 100 breaker labels, and I need to be able to easily find each one of them.

Here are my requirements for labeling all these breakers. 

1. So I need to label the breakers in a way that I can run a Find on them when I need to (because Acrobat can't successfully run OCR on this image).
2. I need to be able to have the labels small, so they don't take up too much space and obscure my screen while I am labeling them.
3. I need the labels color-coded.

Both Acrobat and Photoshop will allow me to do item #1 (label the breakers), but only Acrobat will allow me to run a Find on the labels.

Acrobat: Search Comments

Photoshop can handle #2: labeling while keeping the labels small. It is a much better solution than Acrobat. See how large this comment is in Acrobat? It takes up way to much space! If you click on a comment in Acrobat, the giant pop-up note covers the page.

Comments in Acrobat obscure the image.

Acrobat does have a preference that will align the sticky notes to the edge of the document, but it only works well if you have the comments pane closed.

The width of neither the Comments pane nor the sticky note pop-ups are changeable, so if you have both open, they take up a huge amount of screen real estate.

Acrobat Comment aligned to the edge of the page, with Commenting Pane open

When viewing document, Acrobat centers your document in the window, giving you no ability to drag it over to the left a bit to free up some space on the right for the comments. See all that wasted gray space on the left?

All the gray space is wasted! 

Contrast this with Photoshop. When I click on a note, it doesn't automatically pop-up. The content simply displays in the Notes panel. Plus, I can drag the image over and fully utilize the entire window. The note icon is so small and elegant! Can you even find it in the image below? It doesn't obscure the image, and it's contents are displayed unobtrusively in the Notes pane, which I can either dock or drag wherever I want.

So Photoshop is definitely where I want to do my labeling.

Acrobat can handle item #3: color-coding. This is a very important part of my workflow, and I have written about it extensively. At first glance, Photoshop has no options for Notes. All you can do is navigate through the notes, delete them, or close the panel.

Photoshop Notes Panel

 Compare that with the Photoshop Character Panel, which is rich with options, including the ability to change the color.

Photoshop Character Panel

For real customization of my notes, I have historically used Acrobat, because the user interface exists and is easy to find.

We've already discovered that Notes made on a Photoshop PDF in Acrobat. But one day, I happened to open in Photoshop a Photoshop PDF that I had color-coded in Acrobat. And guess what happened?!

Colored Notes in Photoshop!

The notes were colored! It turns out that Photoshop has the ability to display different colors of notes! After using Photoshop notes for years, I recently discovered that when the Note tool is selected, the control bar displays two options: Author (which is blank by default), and Color. It is these two attributes that are interchangeable with Acrobat. 

Notes options in the Photoshop Control Bar

The default behavior for attributes is different program to program. For example:

• InDesign: The default attributes of new objects are set when nothing is selected.
• Illustrator: The default attributes of new objects are picked up from the last object that you had selected.
• Acrobat: the default properties of new annotations are set when you choose "Make Properties Default."

In Photoshop, the default properties of new notes are more like Illustrator: they are picked up by whatever note you most recently had selected. Of course, you can also simply change the color in the Control bar. However, it's important to note that if you want to utilize Acrobat's Sort Comments By Color feature, the colors you choose need to match exactly. So rather than assigning all the Note colors using the Color Picker eyedropper, I prefer to simply either copy and paste the notes, and then change their content, or click on a note that is the color that I want, and then make a new note set to that color.

How to Sort and Search Notes

Once you've got your notes in Photoshop, it's time to head back over to Acrobat. But first, let's take a final look altho completely notated Photoshop document.

Photoshop PDF with Colored Notes

Save your file as a Photoshop PDF, being sure to check the Notes checkbox.

Now open that file in Acrobat. The notes are color-coded and full searchable! Now I have all the functional that I need for my notes, but I didn't have to endure the overbearing and inflexible user interface of Acrobat commenting to create this.

Colored and Searchable Notes in Acrobat