Adobe has announced that there will be a web launch event introducing Adobe Creative Suite 5 on April 12, 2010. The launch page contains several preview videos of new features and workflows.
The event is also billed as a “first look,” so don’t expect the software to be available right away.
See the launch event page at:
http://cs5launch.adobe.com/
Note: The following behavior is what I’ve seen in Acrobat 7 and 8 on Mac OS X. I’m not sure if it works better in the Windows versions of Acrobat. Also, this technique may not apply in Acrobat X and later because the comment list interface is slightly different.
You can select multiple comments in the Comments panel in Acrobat, but not in the way you’d expect. Let’s say you want to set the status of three comments to “Completed.” Your natural inclination would be to Shift-click or Command-click them, but it somehow doesn’t work like it does in other programs: even though you’re holding down a modifier key, the only comment selected is the last one you clicked.
To select multiple comments, you need to click just below the top edge of each comment while holding down a modifier key. For example, to select a range of comments, click the first comment you want to select, and then Shift-click just below the top edge of the last comment you want to select. It might take a little practice, but you’ll get it.
OS X supports a large number of world languages, but if you only understand one language, you’re hauling around many megabytes of files you don’t need. Many Mac users try to free up some disk space by using a utility that removes versions of files for languages they don’t want. This has given rise to a class of utilities that hunt down and delete all the files for specified languages. Some of these utilities are:
Delocalizer [Note: This software appears to be discontinued. (June 2011) ]
Macaroni
Monolingual
Youpi Optimizer [Note: This link is now dead. (June 2011) ]
Nearly all of my applications run fine after delocalization, but there are a few that don’t like to have their localized resources deleted, and they refuse to run without them. These applications might not display a specific error message for this, so all you see is a general error message that leaves you guessing.
The applications that I know about that don’t like to be delocalized are:
Adobe Illustrator CS2 (the 12.0.1 updater fails to install the update)
Adobe Acrobat 7 (Macaroni users update to Macaroni 2.0.6 or later)
Adobe Acrobat 8 (application will not launch, says “A required component was not found.”)
(NOTE: Macaroni 2.0.8 is now available, and according to its release notes, it will no longer delocalize any Adobe applications. This should prevent future Macaroni delocalization problems with Adobe apps.)
If you run a delocalizer and those applications or their updaters stop working, you must reinstall the application. Then you have a choice: Either see if your delocalizer utility has a way to exclude specific applications (a whitelist), or don’t delocalize again. Read on for why that second option might be realistic.
Nobody likes to have something not work, especially if it’s just one pesky app that breaks after delocalization when all the other apps are fine. And delocalization can benefit users with small hard disks. But you may not need to delocalize if you have an up-to-date computer. Today’s hard drives, now typically 250GB and up even on notebooks, are so large that a hundred or so megabytes of localized files are unlikely to be the major cause of a full hard drive. If your Mac hard drive is filling up, you’ll probably get a lot further by moving unneeded movies, photos, and music to another drive. One hour of miniDV format video from is around 13GB, many times larger than all your localized files. Also, the digital audio and graphics samples that come with multimedia applications such as GarageBand, Apple Soundtrack, and Apple LiveType take up several gigabytes on their own, so you might want to clean house there unless you need those samples.
Why would an application fail after delocalization? In many cases an application will use a checksum to verify its integrity. It knows what its file size was when originally installed, and if it notices that there’s a discrepancy the next time it launches (because you removed stuff), it won’t run. It does this because a size discrepancy can indicate that the application code has become corrupted or that malware has infected and modified the application for its own nefarious purposes. Those are some of the reasons why an application may be built to be extremely suspicious when its size changes, to the point of shutting itself down. The developer wants to make sure that the application won’t do any damage to your files.
By default, Acrobat versions 7 and 8 label your PDF comments with your login username, which may not have any resemblance to your real name. During a review involving several reviewers, this can make it difficult to figure out who made certain comments in a PDF.
Not only it is not obvious how to set the default identity, the preference that should make it happen doesn’t. But with a few trips to different areas of Acrobat, it can eventually be done.
To set your default comment identity:
1. Open the Preferences dialog box in Acrobat and go to the Identity panel.
2. Make sure the Name represents the name you want to use to label your comments.
3. Go to the Commenting panel in the Preferences dialog box.
4. Under Making Comments, make sure “Always use Log-in name for Author name” is disabled.
5. Click OK to close the Preferences dialog box.
6. Select any commenting tool, such as the Note tool, and add a comment. It doesn’t have to be anything important, because you can delete it after you’ve completed this procedure.
7. Right-click the comment and choose Properties. (This step seems to work only if the comment’s window is closed on the page.)
8. Click General and make sure the Author name is the name you want to use to label all of your comments, and click Close.
9. Right-click the comment and choose Make Current Properties Default.
That should do it. While it would seem that steps 2 and 4 should get the job done, the entire reason this procedure is necessary is that Step 4 never seems to work on its own.
conrad chavez | blog 