In preparation for my Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) exam for Acrobat 6 at the end of December, I spent far more time in that application than I normally do, trying out every button and panel, investigating all the nooks and crannies. Not surprisingly, I discovered some interesting functions in Acrobat 6 that I find enormously useful, and perhaps you may as well. (And yes, I passed the test.)

First, if you have Acrobat 6 (Standard or Pro), make sure you download Adobe's patch, bringing it to 6.01:

more >

This is not a tip, exactly, but simply an alert to something I've written elsewhere that you might find illuminating.

Late last year I completed a print project for a client — a direct mail brochure — using most of the Creative Suite applications. In our studio, it was CS's "maiden voyage" with a high-end project from start to finish.

I wrote an article about the project — what new features came in handy, what mistakes I made — and titled it "Adobe CS in the Real World" (Original title: "I Am Joe's Brochure With Transparency."… if you've never read a Reader's Digest, you're probably going "huh?" … never mind.)

more >

A significant number of Windows-based designers have difficulty getting special characters (bullets, em dashes, etc.) into their layout files. I see this a lot when I'm doing on-site training. They use the old ASCII code method of pressing ALT while entering a 4-digit code on their keypad, and often have cheat sheets of these taped to their monitors. Or they've got one "good" digital file containing the characters which they keep handy on their desktop, and copy/paste the characters from there when they need them.

more >

No version of OS X to date has included the ability to print the contents of a Finder window as we had in OS 9. I have no idea why this is apparently such a tough nut for the wizard programmers at Apple.

Many workarounds abound, but none achieve the simplicity of making a window active, pressing Command-P, and getting a printout of the entire contents of the window, including what was hidden in the scroll bars, and including all the columns (date, size, etc.).

more >