Month: April 2010

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Acrobat 9: We Want You to Read This (But Not All of You, Apparently)

by David R. Mankin

You couldn't escape it in recent weeks. There was a new plan to reform the United State's health care system. There were screams for the promised transparency. They shoved, pushed, yelled… and the level of rhetoric was feverish.

In an attempt to bring the general public into the arena of discussion, the White House apparently released a PDF in which "Stability & Security for All Americans" was proclaimed.

I had a few problems with the PDF and none of them had anything to do with politics or health care at all. The PDF had the White House's URL at the bottom, but I noticed the URL text was NOT linked. Finding this curious, I inspected the document a bit more closely. By starting Acrobat's Accessibility Quick Check (Advanced > Accessibility > Quick Check), I discovered that the PDF was not tagged and therefore would not pass the government's own "508" standards. (In 1998, Congress amended the Rehabilitation Act to require Federal agencies to make their electronic and information technology accessible to people with disabilities.) Imagine that–the White House, at the very TOP of the government's chain of command, did not follow the rules. Curious, huh?

In fairness, I have no way of knowing if this was an official, government-sanctioned flyer. It did not have a digital signature and the Document's properties revealed no metadata pointing back to the document's origin.

So now I was curious about that famous 2000+ page health care bill that has dominated the domestic news reports. The White House promised that the bill would be released for anyone to read… ANYONE. I went searching around the Web for the document and I quickly found links to the bill in PDF format.

I downloaded the PDF and opened it in Acrobat 9 Pro.

As promised, it was more than 2,000 pages (2,409 to be exact). I immediately saw a Digital Certification across the top of the view panel: "Certified by the Superintendent of Documents" at the US Government Printing Office. The PDF was for real.

Two things about the PDF screamed at me immediately. First, it was extremely long. Second (are you ready for this?), the PDF contained no bookmarks. None. There was no way to intelligently read and navigate the document other than to start on page 1 and end at page 2409.

Need to find if the new bill affects retired military's TriCare coverage? No bookmark to help you find it. Care to guess whether this is a tagged document that might meet the government's own criteria for "508 Compliancy"? Nope. Untagged. Unacceptable.

I know one famous address that needs an Acrobat class. Might you too?

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About the author: David R. Mankin is a Certified Technical Trainer, desktop publisher, computer graphic artist, and Web page developer. And if that wasn't enough, of course David is an Adobe-certified expert in Adobe Acrobat.
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Writing & Grammar Workshop: The Reverse Outline

by Jennie Ruby

Essays, narratives, introductions, reviews and opinion pieces can benefit from reverse outlining. In a reverse outline, you take your first draft and label its parts. Every paragraph gets a label summarizing its main idea, or at least its first idea. You can write these labels in the margin of a printout, in a separate screen, or on a piece of paper. Once you have identified the first topic of a paragraph, check the rest of the paragraph to make sure it sticks to its topic. If a new topic or idea surfaces, write an additional label.

Once every paragraph is labeled, the labels constitute your reverse outline. You have derived from your writing the original order of your thoughts. Now you can examine the order and decide which thoughts go together, which thoughts are subtopics of the others, and whether you need to change the order.

At this stage, I like to type the labels into Microsoft Word or into specialized outlining software so I can drag and drop the labels until I am satisfied with their order and hierarchy.

Once you have settled on your new outline, you are faced with getting your old draft into the new order. Here is where technology can help.

First, get your outline into your word processor. If you have organized your outline with arrows and numbers on paper, type it in. If you have used outlining software, such as Mindjet's MindManager, export your outline to Word.

With the new outline in a new document, and your draft text in your original document, set up your screen so you can see both documents at once. If you are using Word, you can use the View Side by Side tool to view the two documents at the same time. Turn off the Synchronous Scrolling function. Now you can drag and drop (or cut and paste) each sentence or paragraph from your old draft into its proper place in your new outline.

I do recommend dragging or cutting the text from the old document, and not copying, because I once copied the same sentence into two different locations and was at risk of giving my readers déjà vu.

Once you have dragged or copied all the text from the original draft, close the original without saving and your draft will be preserved in its original state.

Your new draft will no doubt need some work to smooth over transitions between ideas in their new locations, but once that is done you can be confident that you have a well-organized document.

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About the Author:  Jennie Ruby is a veteran IconLogic trainer and author with titles such as "Editing with Word 2003 and Acrobat 7" and "Editing with MS Word 2007" to her credit. She is a publishing professional with more than 20 years of experience in writing, editing and desktop publishing.

Jennie teaches two classes popular online classes: Writing Effective eLearning Voiceover Scripts and Writing Training Documents and eLearning Scripts.