Before you
start using the Adobe
software, you should have a number of Word Processed files (e.g.
Microsoft Word .doc files) representing the chapters/sections
of your report. If you have ArcView figures that are interspersed
throughout the chapters, I would reserve separate pages for them
within the document (using page breaks) and save all your layouts
to .eps (Encapsulated Postscript) files in ArcView. When you're
ready to start, you should have a bunch of .doc files and a bunch
of .eps files.
***VERY IMPORTANT*** If any
of your ArcView layouts include polygon coverages that are represented
by some colored outline and a transparent (or blank) foreground
(such as for a watershed boundary), you should remove these from
your views/layouts and replace them with arc representations of
the same coverage. You can create these arc representations by
using the build command at the "Arc" prompt like this:
build coveragename line. It is important that your ArcView
layouts have no polygon coverages with transparent foregrounds,
as conversion of these layouts to .PDF files will result in rasterization
errors when the .PDF files are displayed in the Adobe Acrobat
Reader.
Your .doc files should be set up as if they were camera-ready, i.e. your report is in its final form, ready to go to the printer (you'll probably even have a hard copy of it). Once your chapters are at this stage, open each of them in the Word Processing application (Word), select PRINT, change the printer to a laser type printer (e.g. pdf writer or hp4mv) and then select Close (rather than OK). CAREFULLY view your chapters to see if the kerning performed for the laser printer has changed the layout of your document. This change in layout will typically show up as an additional page (or pages) with only one line of text just prior to one of your inserted page breaks. If this happens to you (it did to me) you'll need to reformat your chapter(s) before you start converting them to .PDF files.
The reformatting process that I
used was tedious and time consuming. There must be a better way,
but at least this way does work, even if it does seem to be a
bit "brute force" like. The steps that I took to "get
around" the kerning problem were:
Like I said, if you can come up with
a better way to address the kerning problem, you'll be my hero.
The links that you can build in
Adobe Acrobat place colored boxes around the linked text rather
than create colored hyperlinks. I prefer colored hyperlinks (a
la HTML), so before I start any PDF conversion, I identify where
I want my links to be and use the Format > Font option in
Word to change colors from black to whatever (I used red to specify
links within the documents and blue to specify bookmarks). Bookmarks
are pointers to strategic places in the document (e.g. chapter
headings, section headings). The difference between bookmarks
and links is that bookmarks access locations within the document
from a list (looks like an outline) that is exterior to
the document. Links connect places within a document to
other places within the document. At this point, you won't be
creating the links & bookmarks, just marking the Word
text for later creation of links & bookmarks.
I had a few figures in my document
for which I didn't have electronic copies. These had basically
been photocopied from other sources, then cut and pasted with
figure titles & references. I used the scanner to
create electronic copies of these figures. To use the scanner,
open HP DeskScan II DeskScan II v2.2. Make sure that the scanner
is turned on and place into it the page that you want to scan.
To scan in black & white figures, I found that, for good
quality figures, selecting Sharp B&W Photo as the
type of scan and then selecting Preview and Zoom
in that order produced the best results (although it does also
give the figures a slightly gray background). You can use the
mouse/cursor to reposition the top, bottom, left, and right margins.
When you've got the figure looking like you want it, you select
Final and specify the file type as an EPSF (Screen Image)
type. You can then either save the file to the e:\home1 drive
(which is equivalent to the d: drive on the networked Niger PC),
or save it to a drive resident on the PC and FTP it to a directory
on Danube.
Now it's time to convert your .doc and .eps files into .PDF files. Since the .doc files now have colored text embedded, they need to be converted to postscript files first. In Word, open up each of the .doc files and specify the Acrobat Distiller as the Printer. Also, select the "Print To File" option. When you are prompted to enter the name of the new file, make sure that you select Save As Type: All Files (*.*) instead of Printer Files (*.prn). Then, specify the path to the directory where you want the file saved and save the file as filename.ps. Do this for each of your .doc files.
Next, FTP all of your .eps files from the UNIX network to the PC where Adobe Acrobat is installed. Don't forget to specify "binary" as the transmission mode for these files. At this point, you should have all of your chapters existing as .ps files and all of your .eps files resident on the PC.
PDF files are then created using
the Adobe Acrobat Distiller application. It's simple to use.
When you open the Distiller, select File > Open and specify
a .ps or .eps file to convert. The Distiller then prompts you
to verify whether the associated PDF file should have the same
filename (i.e. filename.ps filename.PDF). You just click OK
and the Distiller creates the .PDF file. Through repeating this
process, you'll end up with a slew of .PDF files, one for each
.ps and .eps file that you started with. Each of your Word documents,
ArcView layouts, and scanned figures should now exist as .PDF
files. You can view any one of them using the Adobe Acrobat Exchange
application. Just open up the application and select one of your
.PDF files for inspection.
You can merge the ArcView layout and scanned .PDF files into your chapter .PDF files using the Adobe Acrobat Exchange application. With Exchange running, open a chapter .PDF file and scroll down to one of the blank pages that you had "reserved" with page breaks. Select Edit > Pages > Replace from the menu and a window will prompt you to specify which .PDF file you'd like to replace the page with. Just select the appropriate figure.PDF file, and the figure will be inserted into your chapter, replacing the blank page that you had reserved for it earlier. Just follow this process to insert all of your figures into the chapters.
Once all of the figures are merged
into all of the chapters, you can also create one large .PDF file
of your complete report by inserting chapters in the appropriate
order using the Edit > Pages > Insert option in the Exchange
application.
When all of your figures are inserted
into the appropriate places in your document, links can be created
from the colored text "hyperlinks" that you had previously
defined. To do this, select Tools Link (or the little
"chain" icon). Then use the mouse/cursor to draw a
box around the text that you want to link. This will produce
a "Create Link" window. In this window, specify Invisible
under the Appearance section (since you've already identified
the links with colored text, you don't need a visible box around
the text, too). With Action Type specified as "Go To
View", scroll to the figure, table, or whatever that
you want to link to. When that page of the document is displayed,
you can change the Magnification option to your liking and then,
finally select "Set Link".
A set of Bookmarks can be created for each of your .PDF files. These bookmarks appear as an Outline in a separate window to the left of the document in the Exchange application. I defined each of my chapter headings, section headings, and subject headings as document locations that I wanted to have bookmarked. I had identified these entities my marking them with blue text in the original Word documents. To create each bookmark, select Edit > Copy (or the icon with the dashed box around text; or CTRL C) and highlight the text that you want bookmarked with the mouse/cursor. Then select Edit > Bookmark > New (or CTRL B) to make a space for the bookmark in the list. Finally, select Edit > Paste (or CTRL V) to paste the copied text as the bookmark text. If you make a mistake, just highlight the botched entry in the list of bookmarks and select Edit > Clear. No problem.
When you're done creating all your
bookmarks for a particular .PDF file, you can indent some of them
on your list simply by clicking on the "little page"
to the left of the bookmark text and physically moving the text
to the right. This will allow you to create a hierarchy of chapters,
sections, and subjects.
You can also create a set of thumbnail
sketches of the pages throughout each of your documents, once
everything is merged together. This is a neat feature that gives
the reader the option to quickly scan through your document and
pick out figures, tables, or sections that they might be interested
in. To create the thumbnails using the Adobe Acrobat Exchange
application, select Edit > Thumbnails > Create All.
In the Acrobat Exchange application,
you have the options of (1) viewing your document by itself, (2)
viewing your document with the Bookmarks window displayed, or
(3) viewing your document with the Thumbnails window displayed.
To cycle between these three options, just cycle between the
three left-most icons on the Adobe Acrobat Exchange tool bar.
That's it!! Enjoy !!