Customer Reviews

Adobe Acrobat 7 PDF Bible

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Having had no experience with Acrobat except for the reader, this book is on my desk whenever I use my program. It is my bible, I look up everything I can't figure out and it helps me every time. Very thick heavy book, I didn't read the book through, I just look up things as I need them and have found everything I have needed so far.

I bought this specifically for information about using the new LiveCycle Designer application that comes with Acrobat Professional to create interactive PDF forms. All of the information in this book (Chapters 26-29) is wrong about that app--none of the dialog boxes match, or are even close, and the program doesn't work the way it's described. I'm guessing that Adobe changed it after the book was written.

Some of these other comments puzzle me, as I work with Acrobat professionally every day and have come to depend on this book. So far it's never let me down. In fact, I own at least two previous editions of this and have always found it to be comprehensive, deep and useful. Is there anything about Acrobat that author Ted Padova doesn't know? I doubt it. This great resource should be standard issue for any creative professional working today!

It's huge: 896 pages; 40 pages for the index alone. Yet the topic I bought it to learn about -- an important one: exporting PDF documents to HTML -- receives only 2 pages (that's all that's cited in the index, anyway). And these basically just walk through the menu command involved and its options, adding little or nothing in the way of explanation, guidance or advice. Does exporting an N-page PDF presentation to HTML create N linked web pages, or one huge (and thus largely useless) page? Had to experiment to find out it's the latter. Any explanation, even a brief one, of the CSS style sheet available in one of the options? Nope (and I never found where the sheet went in any case).

As an another downside (IHMO anyway) it attempts to cover both 7.0 Standard (which all of its purchasers will want, and which is a behemoth by itself) and 7.0 Professional (which greatly complicates the presentation, and which many fewer purchasers may want).

As the title says: Maybe it's better than my lukewarm initial reaction -- but I doubt it.

I don't know what's going on with this book. The prime difference between version 6 and version 7 is the inclusion of Adobe Lifecycle Designer. This book says virtually nothing on such an important area. It does little to address database connections.
Unfortunately, there is no real reference for this program.
It covers commenting and stuff like that, but overall it is a big heavy great looking book that has left me still struggling.

This is a comprehensive book on Acrobat, but it suffers from a lack of cross-platform coverage. Most of the book was covered with Acrobat for Windows, with the Mac as an afterthought. Mr. Padova has plenty of experience with creative applications with the Macintosh; his coverage of Acrobat, which is such an integral part of Adobe's Creative Suite, is disappointingly Windows-oriented It is comprehensive, but best served as a reference book. Windows-features such as PDFMaker in Office are well-documented elsewhere - I would have liked to see him cover the specific differences between platforms.

I would also have expected that an author with so much experience with Acrobat to offer tips on performance, shortcuts, etc. Given the lack of Acrobat 7 books available, however, it is probably the most comprehensive one available.