This is the third in a series of articles about Adobe Reader, the free software used to view and print pdf files.

Be careful!
Last month, I suggested you can speed up Adobe Reader 6.0 by moving the contents of the plug_ins folder to the "optional" folder. If you decide to try this way of speeding up the Reader, please be sure you MOVE the files. Do not DELETE them! You may want to restore some or all of them to the plug_ins folder. For example, in a large pdf document, I often find the search function useful. Some time after using the above method to speed up Adobe Reader, I tried to use the search function and got the following message: "A plug-in used to perform Search is missing. Please reinstall Acrobat". (Isn't it interesting that Adobe's error message still says "Acrobat" instead of the program's new name Adobe Reader?) My initial panic was soon replaced by frustration as I realized that the search function was one of the plug-ins I had so conveniently relocated on my hard drive. Fortunately, Adobe gives its plug-ins logical names, so as soon as I copied the (two) files named "search" back to the plug_ins folder and restarted Adobe Reader, the search function worked just fine. The moral of this short story: there is nearly always a functionality sacrifice in order to gain speed, and Adobe Reader is no exception.

Help Using Adobe Reader
The whole point of this series of articles is to, hopefully, pique your interest in this free, useful tool, so that you experiment with it and find what works for you. I couldn't begin to tell you everything (even if I knew it!) in a few newsletter articles. If you use Adobe Reader very much at all, you will soon come upon a question that I haven't covered. Try these options to answer your question:

1. Adobe Reader, like most programs, has built-in help files; they're easily accessible by clicking the "Help" link in the top menu bar. Adobe Reader's help files are better than many…they seem logically organized and are full of screenshots. (If you have Adobe Reader open inside an Internet Explorer window and click "Help", you will get the help files for I.E. Open Adobe Reader separately if you wish to access Adobe Reader help.)
   
   
2. Ask your question in the ICON forums on our web site. (Or if you found the answer to your question, share the question and answer with the rest of us in the ICON forums. That's one of the ways you can give back!)
   
   
3. Adobe has its own forums at http://www.adobeforums.com/ . Just as with ICON's forums, you are free to browse and search Adobe's forums as a guest, but if you wish to post a question, you are asked to register. Adobe also has a searchable knowledgebase.

Navigating a Document
Adobe Reader's "work area" is divided into three panes. On the left is the navigation pane (use F6 to show/hide), in the middle is the Document pane, and on the right is the "How To" pane (use F4 to show/hide). Use the navigation buttons at the bottom of the Document pane to quickly get to where you want to go in the document. Or type the number of the page you want to view. For example, if the document I'm viewing has a table of contents, and what I want to view is on page 18, I can simply click in the navigation box (it says "2 of 24" in the illustration), type the number 18 and press enter. That's lots faster than scrolling through 17 pages. Use the hand tool to "grab" (left click and drag) to move the page up or down.

If the document creator has placed "bookmarks" in the document, they will appear in the navigation pane on the left. Clicking a bookmark will take you directly to the related place in the document. Use the "Pages" tab navigation pane to see thumbnails of each page of the document. Clicking on a thumbnail will take you to that page.

Search Feature
Another way to quickly locate the information you want in a pdf document is to use the Search feature. Click the binoculars on the toolbar, and a search form will open in the right-hand "How To" pane. Type your search term(s) and click the search button. As you might expect, all instances of your search term will appear in the results window, but Adobe Reader has an added feature: it lists the search term AND the text immediately before and after the term. The document pane automatically jumps to the first instance of your search term, and the term is highlighted in the document. Nice! (Note: PDF files that were created from a scanned document rather than from the original text may not be searchable.)

Snapshot Tool
Select the Snapshot tool, left click and drag over a portion of the pdf document page. Once the dotted rectangular line surrounds what you want, release the mouse button, and the selection will automatically be copied to your Windows clipboard. It can then be pasted into the program of your choosing…Word, Excel, a graphics editor, etc. This is a great quick way to capture a logo or just a portion of a screenshot. If you select text with the Snapshot tool, it will not be editable, since the "snapshot" is an image.

Select Text/Image
If text is what you want to copy from a pdf document and use elsewhere, click on the Select Text tool, and highlight the text you want to copy. Right-click, and copy the selection to the clipboard. Paste to the program of your choosing. The Select Image tool (available by clicking the down arrow next to the Select Text tool) works similarly for images.

Most of us have unthinkingly used Adobe Reader to view pdf files. Try a few of these tools to enhance your viewing experience!

(Next month: Using Adobe Reader with E-Books and the Read-Aloud Function.)