Recently, a colleague interested in
purchasing training materials that I wrote called with a
last-minute emergency. There wasn’t time for me to send bound
and printed manuals over-night to arrive for the training
classes she was conducting. To complicate matters, she didn’t
want all 60 pages of my manual; she wanted only the first 30
pages. I solved the problem by sending her an e-mail with an
Adobe Acrobat version of the 30 pages along with a smaller
table of contents and a cover page.
Most people are familiar with Adobe
Acrobat Reader, but few know about or use the full-blown
version of Adobe Acrobat. If you create a word processor
document, its appearance will depend on which fonts you select
and the printer. If you send that document to someone with a
different word processor or other fonts, the document's
appearance is totally different. The Reader program allows you
to view documents with a .pdf (portable document format) file
extension as they originally were prepared — fonts and all.
Another benefit of the Adobe for-mat is
that the file size, especially for documents containing
graphics, is smaller than the comparable word processing
version or popular graphic formats such as .jpg or .tif. The
other advantage of documents in .pdf format is they can only
be viewed; they can-not be altered. This makes it ideal for
sending documents to clients or adversaries to review, since
you control the editing.
The Adobe Reader program is free and
often is included with many popular software programs. As a
result, many courts, including most of the U.S. District and
U.S. Bankruptcy courts, have chosen Adobe as their preferred
style to receive electronic filings.
To obtain a copy of Adobe Acrobat
Reader, log on to
adobe.com
and choose the Reader download option. This will put a setup
file on your hard drive enabling you to install the pro-gram.
Then, when you receive a document in .pdf format, whether an
e-mail attachment, on a disk or from a colleague, you can
double-click on the file name while in Windows Explorer and
the file will open in Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Tools
The Reader program includes a number of
tools for working with a document in .pdf format. You can view
it, zoom in or out, view thumb-nails (graphic representations
of each page), print it, search for words or phrases, jump to
specific pages, or use linked bookmarks to navigate to
specific sections of large documents.
Corel Corp. has licensed the Adobe
technology in its 2000 and 2002 suites (WordPerfect 9 and 10)
and includes the ability to publish a WordPerfect document in
the .pdf format without additional software. Law firms using
WordPerfect (and there still are many) can prepare briefs and
convert them to .pdf for e-filing. When a document is open on
the screen, choose File/Publish to .pdf, and choose the name
and location for the .pdf version of the document. You can
e-mail that to the court, a client or someone who must see the
document with its original formatting but who you don’t want
to make direct edits.
Adobe Corp. would have been out of
business years ago if one of its main products was free to all
comers. How-ever, the Reader program is a small subset of the
Adobe Acrobat program. Adobe Acrobat version 5 actually
includes the Reader along with several other tools that
together allow creation of documents in Adobe format and
control how they can be edited or manipulated to manage
collaborations. When combined with a scanner, the Adobe
Acrobat software is a major step toward a paperless office.
Once Adobe software is installed and a scanner attached to the
computer, you can use it to scan documents directly into Adobe
format. They will be smaller than comparable .tif documents.
The full program has many tools that
allow you to work with and manipulate documents in .pdf
format. With version 5, documents can be converted into .pdf
merely by opening them with Acrobat. If your firm uses the
Microsoft Office suite, installing Adobe Acrobat will add an
option to your File menu to Create Adobe .pdf. This isn’t
necessary for WordPerfect users because Corel already has li-censed
some Acrobat tools from Adobe so those using versions 9 and 10
have the option to publish a document into .pdf format without
purchasing the full Adobe Acrobat program. However, even for
Corel advocates, there are a number of advantages to owning
the complete program, which retails for $249.
Scanning
With Adobe Acrobat 5.0, documents can be
scanned directly into .pdf format. Instead of using the
scanner’s software, you can use Acrobat and choose
File/Import/Scan. If you’re sending documents by e-mail, you
can include a digital signature or require the recipient to
supply a password to open it. This would limit someone else
who has Acrobat from tampering with your file. Within
Acrobat’s security options, you can restrict recipients from
printing your document, making changes, extracting some text,
or adding or changing comments or forms.
Acrobat 5.0 also has tools for working
on and off the Internet. Among these are a variety of shapes,
pencils and highlighters. These can draw a circle around text
and mark a document to call attention to a section of text.
For example, you can convert web pages into .pdf documents or
make documents accessible to a group of people in their web
browser. While discussing the document, it can be marked or
highlighted, making it easier for the group to agree on the
final version. It’s easy to add comments to an Acrobat
document.
The document can either reside on your
firm’s server or can be made accessible through your website
or one of the collaboration web services like
gotomypc.com
or webex.com,
which allows a group to access the same screens
simultaneously. The program also includes the ability to
manage and review comments from a group of contributors.
Having assisted in the editing of many books for the American
Bar Association where authors contributed by e-mail, I can
only imagine how much more efficiently we could have worked
with tools like Adobe Acrobat and the Internet.
Another component of Adobe Acrobat is a
built-in form tool. You could take one of your firm’s forms
and convert it into an online fill-in form. Using the Form
Tool, you can add boxes, various buttons or drop-down lists.
These fields can be made read-only or required to be filled in
so you can guide people through completing the form. There
even are tools to assist people completing the form to move
easily to the next required field. Creative attorneys have
begun to use these tools on their websites to collect
in-formation about potential clients. For example, it’s easy
to conceive an elder law attorney devising a checklist of
is-sues when considering long-term health insurance.
Many practice areas can benefit from
using forms on the firm’s website for potential clients.
Employment lawyers could create forms so clients can complete
basic information about their employees rather than requiring
the firm’s staff to do data entry for preparing EEOC reports.
Personal injury lawyers could collect information about
potential clients before spending time to evaluate the merits
of their case.
With its navigation tools, commonly
accessible format and acceptance by the courts, Adobe Acrobat
is worth investigating.
