Category: Adobe’s Technical Communication Suite

Among other things, the patch improves Captivate's audio quality significantly. In addition, there is improved support for USB microphones and sound cards for those developers using Captivate with MS Vista.

An issue with linking to other Captivate projects has been resolved. And now the correct project title appears as the HTML title when the project is published and viewed in a Web browser.

You can learn more about the patch here.

Downloading the patch is simple (and free): start Captivate and choose Help > Updates. 

• If you are viewing a PDF file, and you don't see the main menu (File, Edit, View, Document, etc.) across the top of your Acrobat interface, you are missing your Menu Bar (that's its official name). The keyboard shortcut used to toggle showing and hiding the Menu Bar is the F9 key. Odds are good that if you press F9, your missing Menu Bar will quickly come back to its rightful place at the top of your Acrobat window.
• If you attempt to click on a tool like the Save button or the Print button, and there are no tools to be found, you may want to try pressing the F8 on your keyboard (this key is a toggle that shows and hides toolbars).
• Some folks have been puzzled by missing Navigation Panels, like the Pages Panel, Bookmarks, etc. They don't even see little icons on the left side that, when clicked, spring the panels open. The easy solution to this problem is to press the F4 key on your keyboard (this displays and hides the Navigation Panel).

Let's forget about FrameMaker for a moment and think about the em dash. The em dash normally demarcates a parenthetical thought where someone is starting a new thought within a single sentence. Typists who can't figure out how to insert an em dash into their documents often type in two sequential hyphens, like this —. Not very professional, but you'll see it all the time.

Back to FrameMaker. If you come across documents that use two dashes instead of em dashes, it's simple to fix. Choose Edit > Find/Change. Type — into the first field and type \m into the second.

One has the option of setting an em dash open or closed. Open means you add a space on each side of the em dash and closed means you don't. As I've observed in my FrameMaker classes, this is a controversial subject for my students, with oddly emotional pleas (considering it's just a typesetting choice) on both sides.

The Chicago Manual of Styles sets em dashes closed, while the New York Times Manual of Style and Usage prefers open em dashes. In my role as classroom mediator, I always recommend that students be consistent: pick a style and stick with it. My personal preference falls somewhere in the middle. I have always preferred to use thin spaces on both sides of my em dashes, but that's just me.

In FrameMaker versions 8 and earlier, it didn't matter how you handled the spacing around your em dashes. While spell checking didn't pick up inconsistencies, it did recognize the em dash with or without spaces and correctly checked the words surrounding it. Not so with FrameMaker version 9. Closed em dashes now produce the dreaded "misspelling?" message on the words that precede and follow it. Ugh. Is this like the Smart Spaces feature that eliminates double spacing so that sentence spacing is no longer up for discussion? I'm guessing no, that this is just a bug.

At least for now, FrameMaker 9 users may want to try out my thin space/em dash/thin space technique, which effectively gets around the problem.

1. Open up the Find/Change dialog box
2. Find Text: \m
3. Change To Text: \i\m\i

I like the look, spell check likes the thin spaces, and everyone is happy again, at least for now.

If you find yourself filling out Acrobat forms frequently, you are probably tired of typing the same things over and over again. First Name, Last Name, Street Address… they don't change from day to day. Both Acrobat Professional and Reader have a great feature to help you with these repetitive typing tasks. The only catch is that it might be disabled on your installation.

Acrobat's Auto-Complete feature will help you speed your way through form fields in which you have typed similar data previously. To enable Auto-Complete, choose Edit > Preferences (or Acrobat > Preferences on the Macintosh). Click on the word Forms at the left, and look at the Auto-Complete section at the right. Your setting choices are Off, Basic and Advanced.

Here are Acrobat's own description of Basic and Advanced:

Basic: The basic auto-complete feature stores the information you enter into form fields and uses these entries to suggest relevant choices as you type into a field. Once you enter a character into a field, a drop-down box displays a list of only the most probable matches. Double-click or press Down Arrow in an empty field to display an even larger list of possible matches.

Advanced: The advanced auto-complete feature stores the information you enter into form fields and uses these entries to suggest relevant choices as you type into a field. If there are probable matches for a field, tabbing into that field will automatically display a list of them. If there is a very probable match, it will be entered in the field automatically. Pressing Tab while the pointer is over an entry in the list chooses the entry and moves to the next field.

There is also a check box to enable or disable numerical data inclusion, and a handy button to facilitate manual editing of the saved entries.

Auto-Complete can cut down on the time you spend filling out forms. You likely use a similar feature in your browser–why not use it in your PDF forms as well.

Here's the problem: you have a PDF file. The source document is not available, but there is a last minute edit needed. You need an image added to the PDF. If the original document were at hand, you could open it up with the file's native application and import a new graphic where needed. Just re-convert to PDF with the image in place and your work is done.

Without the original document, you'll need to edit the PDF file itself. How can this be done? There is an Export command under Acrobat's File menu, but no Import. Hmmm… InDesign calls the command required to import an image onto a page 'Place'. But digging through Acrobat's menus doesn't uncover a Place command either.

Acrobat 9 Professional does have a Place command, but you won't find it under any menu. Here's the trick. With your document open, and with the spot you wish to add the image in your view panel, switch over to Acrobat's Touchup Object Tool (it's the right-most tool on the Advanced Editing Toolbar).

Your cursor will become a black arrow with a small square off to its side. Right-click to bring up a shortcut menu. THERE you will find the Place Image command.

Select Place Image and navigate through your file system for the desired image file.

For this example, I used a .png file to take advantage of the file format's transparency capabilities. Once the image is placed, it remains selected, scalable and moveable with the Touchup Object Tool. Once satisfied, you can switch over to the Hand Tool and click on the page to deselect the image. You can tweak the image at any time by using the Touchup Object Tool.