Adobe Acrobat 8 Classroom in a Book [Paperback]

Adobe Creative Team (Author)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0321470850 | ISBN-13: 978-1848090118 | Publication Date: January 12, 2007

No Acrobat user can afford to miss a beat in his or her production and business task workflow--which makes mastering new versions of key tools like Acrobat a problem. Realizing that the users Acrobat 8 is designed for--creative professionals, business users, and technical and engineering professionals --aren't going to interrupt their work schedules to take a class in the software, Adobe has brought the classroom to them in this handy, comprehensive book. Through a series of self-paced lessons (each of which builds on the last and includes hands-on projects that the reader can create using the files on the CD-ROM), this guide acquaints users with all of Acrobat 8's regular and industrial-strength features for creating, reviewing, editing, commenting on, restructuring, and preflighting PDF files, as well as new features in Acrobat 8: securing private information with new redaction tools; creating dynamic and interactive forms; saving PDF files as Word documents; automatically archiving your Outlook emails to PDF; using newly enhanced reviewing and sharing options, and more. Professional tips and techniques are scattered throughout.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

The Adobe Creative Team of designers, writers, and editors has extensive, real world knowledge of Adobe products. They work closely with the Adobe product development teams and Adobe's Instructional Communications team to come up with creative, challenging, and visually appealing projects to help both new and experienced users get up to speed quickly on Adobe software products.

Product Details

• Paperback: 528 pages
• Publisher: Adobe Press (January 12, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321470850
• ISBN-13: 978-1848090118
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.2 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.2 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #682,292 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

112 of 113 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Reference for All User Levels, April 6, 2005

By 

Mitchell Small (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

After some hesitancy in upgrading the software, I decided to buy the upgraded Classroom in a Book (CIB) for Adobe Acrobat. Other than covering the new features, the format remains the same as CIB for Acrobat 6. This is a good thing as the new version carries the same clear concise instructions as its predecessor. One major improvement is one book now covers both Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Professional. In the book, features that are specific to the Professional version are set in an italicized type face and are preceded by the Acrobat logo.

If you are a beginner to Acrobat document preparation, the lessons will guide you through the basics and take you through the more advanced features. While there is not substitute for experience, a first time user of Acrobat should have no trouble completing the lessons and applying the knowledge to their own projects.

Experienced Acrobat users may wish to use this book as a reference and to quickly get up to speed with the new features. Depending on your level of experience, you may wish to bypass the first three chapters. Even so, I suggest spending some time reading about the Organizer, a new feature that functions like a Bookmarks applet. While not a major breakthrough, it is useful.

The chapter dealing with forms creation using LiveCycle Designer is invaluable. While this is not a tutorial on successful layout, it does provide a very in depth look at the mechanics behind the creation of a form that may be filled out and printed. Features such as text fill in boxes, radio buttons and check boxes are presented along with tips on how to use them effectively. If you are not used to using Acrobat as a creative tool, this section may be an eye opener.

There are also excellent sections on designing pages that make the best use of the medium and how to improve accessibility of your electronic documents. Again, while these are not definitive, the guidelines will point the way to using the features of the program to make the best use of medium in getting your message to as many people as possible. The other chapters are all equally well written and provide good groundwork for such areas as pre-press and electronic publishing.

So far, I've found the Classroom in a Book series to be excellent values. This latest edition is no exception. Whether you are a seasoned veteran looking for a desktop reference or a neophyte just getting started in electronic publication, you will find something here for you.

63 of 66 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thorough reference, but not a tutorial, April 17, 2007

By 

Allen Stenger (Alamogordo, NM USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Adobe Acrobat 8 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

Despite the title, this is a reference and not a tutorial. It shows how to perform various tasks with Acrobat, such as creating PDFs from common office applications, editing and combining existing PDFs, creating forms, and using some of the special features such as shared document reviews, digital signatures, and making documents viewable and accessible on a variety of devices.

The focus in on particular features of Acrobat. There is little discussion of workflows or the steps one might take end-to-end to create a PDF with desired properties. For example, everyone has seen PDFs with tables of contents and indexes that hyperlink to the specified page, but there's no mention of that in this book and you won't learn how to do it here. There are no troubleshooting tips (for example, what do I do if my images come out fuzzy?).

The treatment leaves Adobe Acrobat Distiller a mystery. From time to time there are instructions to go over to Distiller and change some Acrobat setting, but there's no overall explanation of why it works this way. A sidebar "What is Distiller?" would have been nice.

The book is packaged with a CD-ROM containing all the exercise materials and some tutorial videos. The videos, from lynda and from Total Training, cover most of the features new to Acrobat 8 and are very well done. The book itself is competent but uninspiring.

19 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Nice complement to the software, March 23, 2007

By 

A reviewer (Gainesville, Florida United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe Acrobat 8 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

If you need an introduction to the features, intuitive or obscure, in the Acrobat Professional 8 software, this is the book for you. I looked at other titles in the market but none comes close to this book in coverage and ease of use. Pity it doesn't come for free with the software.