Acrobat and PDF: The Hub of Adobe CS
Creativepro.com’s Sandee Cohen gave a sneak peak at the new PDF features in Adobe Creative Suite. Now, Ted Padova and PlanetPDF provide an in-depth look at how Acrobat 6 Professional will work with Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and GoLive for a PDF workflow.
Goodbye Venus – Hello Adobe CS!
Adobe Systems, Inc. announced the forthcoming release of the Adobe Creative Suite (CS). Rather than devote market and sales efforts for new releases of Adobe’s imaging software product line, Adobe is heading in a new direction by emphasizing the benefits of product integration. Adobe’s belief, and what the Adobe marketing people intend to do, is convince users that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
Adobe Creative Suite/Premium Edition includes:
- Adobe GoLive CS (version 7)
- Adobe Photoshop CS (version 8)
- Adobe Illustrator CS (version 11)
- Adobe InDesign CS (version 3)
- Adobe Acrobat 6 Professional
- Version CueThis new announcement is particularly important for the PDF community. As you know, Adobe Acrobat was upgraded to version 6 back in May. It was not a coincidence that Acrobat and the PDF 1.5 specs where released before the CS applications. All the new upgrades across Adobe’s line of imaging programs use the PDF 1.5 specs and take advantage of Acrobat 6 compatibility. What you’ll find among all the new upgrades is PDF at the central core for working back and forth between programs with much greater integration.Export with Ease
All of the new programs support exports direct to PDF as well as the ability to open or import PDF documents. Adobe’s GoLive product is a major breakthrough in Web design programs. With a host of many new features that should appeal to Web designers, GoLive not only supports all the industry standard formats for file imports, it also supports native Photoshop CS, native Illustrator CS, and Adobe PDF files directly.For PDF exports, look at the top-level toolbar and you find a button for PDF Preview. One click and your HTML file is converted to a PDF preview.
To generate the PDF document, open the File menu, click Export and select HTML as Adobe PDF.
Adobe Photoshop CS adds another level of PDF support to current features for opening PDF files in Photoshop and saving direct as a Photoshop PDF document. Open the File Browser and navigate to a folder of image files. You can select all files in a folder or make selections in the File Browser window for all the images you want to include in the resultant PDF document. Click on Automate to open the pull-down menu. From the menu selections, choose PDF Presentation.
The PDF Presentation dialog box opens. You can choose to export to PDF as a multi-page document or a presentation. If you select Presentation, the selected files in the File Browser are converted to PDF and open in Full Screen mode in Acrobat. The pages advance according to the interval you specify in the PDF Presentation dialog box. This feature is like having a mini Photoshop Album application right in Adobe Photoshop CS.
Layers in PDF
Unfortunately, this release of Photoshop doesn’t support creating Adobe PDF Layers. For layered PDF documents, you need to move over to Adobe Illustrator CS or Adobe InDesign CS. As anyone who upgraded to Adobe Acrobat 6 Professional soon learned, the initial release of Acrobat 6 only supported Adobe PDF Layers when exporting to PDF from Microsoft Visio and AutoDesk AutoCAD. Well, for those who want to take advantage of layered PDF documents, the good news is both Adobe Illustrator CS and Adobe InDesign CS support exporting Adobe PDF Layers in a big way.One thing to keep in mind when exporting Adobe PDF Layers is to create the layer view in the authoring application as you want the layers to appear in the resultant PDF file. You can override the layer visibility in Acrobat 6 by changing layer properties, but this just creates additional steps for you.
After creating your layer view in Illustrator, select File and choose Save As from the menu commands. In the Save As dialog box you’ll notice the option for Create Acrobat Layers From Top-Level Layers. Check the box and save the file. When you open the PDF document in any Acrobat viewer including Adobe Reader, the layers are visible in the PDF and the views can be toggled on and off in the Layers panel.
By the way, when you want to use Illustrator as your tool to edit objects, dynamic object editing can be performed with Illustrator CS and the edits you make are preserved on the Adobe PDF layers after saving your edits in Illustrator. Open a PDF document with layers, click the TouchUp Object tool and open a context menu on the object you want to edit. Illustrator CS is launched and the object is shown on the art board. Make edits, click File and choose Save and the edits are dynamically updated on the PDF layer from which you elected to edit the object.
Adobe Illustrator has many other new features including a nice adaptation of code formerly used with Adobe Dimensions. You can create 3D objects with the click of a mouse button and choose many options for extrusions and revolving objects with shading and lighting variations — a very cool feature added to this new release of Adobe illustrator. Sadly though, Venus is gone and I’m sure we’ll all miss her.
Inspired by InDesign
My favorite among the new CS applications is Adobe InDesign. InDesign CS has so many new features and packs so much power, it will take a little time for the seasoned InDesign people to really know all the magnificent opportunities there are available to you in InDesign CS — fabulous things like formatting type in paragraphs that rival traditional typesetting methods, adding headers and footers to imported Excel spreadsheets and automating the additions across all linked text blocks, updating different versions of images with Version Cue, new style sheets that will WOW you, customizing and saving Workspaces, and the list goes on.What with the ability to import native layered Photoshop files, layered Illustrator files, the ability to export direct to PDF with Adobe PDF Layers, and a most sophisticated measure of HTML back to GoLive, this version of InDesign is the best yet. If you’ve been sitting on the fence wondering whether to upgrade to InDesign CS, I suggest you rush out to your software vendor and be the first to place an order.
In InDesign you build a document using the Layers palette and placing objects on layers much like you did with InDesign 2 and the same as working with layers in Adobe Illustrator. In my example below, all the image files from vector illustrations and raster images were all saved in the PDF format and imported into an InDesign CS document with two layers.
On the top layer I imported a movie file. InDesign supports movie clips that can be imported direct in the layout. After setting the layer view you want to appear in Acrobat, click File to open the pull-down menu and choose Export.
In the Export dialog box, be certain to select Acrobat 6 (PDF 1.5) from the Compatibility pull-down menu and enable the checkbox for Create Acrobat Layers.
In Acrobat, I created buttons for showing and hiding layer visibility and set the movie properties to show the movie in a floating window. Inasmuch as movie files are not specific to a layer and can be selected regardless of the layer the user views, I set the movie frame to a tiny rectangle in the upper left corner of the document page. A button field on the opening layer has several actions associated with it — the layer visibility changes, the button is hidden, and another button is made visible when the user views the second layer. That button stops the movie, hides the second button and shows the first button. Thus, when a user clicks the cursor on the document page, one layer opens and plays the movie. Another click stops the movie and changes the layer visibility.
PDF for All
This is just a very short description for using a few of the features in the new Adobe CS Premium Edition suite of software. There’s also Version Cue that enables you to import and change different versions of the same images and objects, a long list of new features in all the programs, and much more support for Adobe PDF files.What’s most beneficial for creative professionals is the seamless integration for swapping data and files back and forth among the applications. For the PDF community, the new features for PDF imports and exports with the Adobe CS applications offer you new means for displaying your PDF files and another step forward for reliable PDF creation.
Copyright © 2003 BinaryThing Pty. Ltd. All Rights Reserved. Used with Permission.
This article was last modified on March 15, 2022
This article was first published on October 8, 2003
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