I have a love/hate relationship with PDF portfolios, the Acrobat 9 PDF format that turns a PDF into a handy ZIP container with a slick front end. I love the interface for customizing it, because it makes me feel like I'm a programmer. "Hmmm, the interface should present thumbnails of the enclosed files on the bottom that you can flick left and right; and a Flash movie should be on the "home" page, with a "Fall leaves" color theme. Or wait ... let me arrange them in list order like the Finder."

So ... the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (aka "the stimulus bill" aka "H.R. 1") ... have you downloaded it yet? You can do so by going to this page and clicking the link to the PDF:
http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/ARRA_public_review/

You don't have to download it right now, but just know that it's a regular PDF, very long (575 pages), full of text. 

The problem we're solving here is that few end users realize you can run Google-like searches in a PDF you've sent them, even from Reader. The Search command is buried in the Edit menu, while its weaker cousin, Find, gets its own field in the default toolbar, along with the well-known Command/Ctrl-F command.

You can force the Search feature's interactive panel to open by default whenever the PDF is opened, making it QUITE OBVIOUS that the PDF is searchable. It works even if the PDF is opened in the browser window ... well, in Safari, at least.

Let's say you're in Acrobat and you need to add some text to a PDF, in the margin or under an image or to fill out a static form field, and you want that text to appear in the printouts, just like the rest of the text. The original file that was exported to PDF isn't available, all you've got is the PDF itself. Which tool do you turn to?

Does this sound familiar: You open a huge PDF and need to quickly find the page containing the topic you're interested in. (We'll assume this PDF has no bookmarks or a linked TOC that will suffice.) 

Our Google-ized instincts immediately reach for the Find (Command/Control-F) field to enter the word or phrase we're looking for. Acrobat (or Reader, doesn't matter) finds the first couple of instances in a reasonable amount of time, but soon it slows to a crawl as we click Find Next one too many times and it hits a dry patch. 

Like a number of other Adobe CS3 users, I was initially aghast at the suite's new icons when they first showed them to the world late last year.

Adobe Systems -- the company with the legacy of some of the most creative icons in the history of interface design, from renditions of Venus de Milo to color-enhanced X-Ray photography of starfish and butterflies -- this same company was *seriously* considering icons that were colored squares and two-letter program name mnemonics? Were they kidding?

Back in November, Adobe asked me if I'd be interested in recording a bunch of video tutorials on InDesign CS3. Well, not Adobe itself; but a nice woman who *worked* for Adobe asked me.

The big news this week in the world of digital design has to be Adobe's announcement of their new line-up of Creative Suite applications, dubbed CS3. I watched the live webcast of their launch shindig in New York City this week, even sat through the unplanned 20-minute "we're pausing for technical difficulties" portion when they were having A/V problems.

I used to go insane in QuarkXPress and InDesign, selecting URLs in the text and setting up hyperlinks to web sites when I wanted the resulting PDF to have live links. Neither layout program makes it easy to do so.

A few years ago I discovered that Adobe Acrobat had a nifty "detect and convert" feature that scanned through the PDF and converted any web URL or e-mail address into a hyperlink on its own. You don't have to create links in the layout program first, just make a PDF out of the document and let Acrobat do the work.

I clearly recall the day years ago when I filled out my first neat-o PDF form in Reader -- it was an "application for vendor status" form I downloaded from a new client's web site -- and it dawned on me that there was no way I could save my entries in the PDF. No Save command. No Save As command. Weird! I had never seen a program without a Save command, I thought it was impossible.