Tag: Acrobat

Hazardous cleanup

Six-frame cartoon. Frame 1: Bespectacled editor and curly-haired editor are each holding a litter picker and a trash bag. The littler pickers have cursors at their tips. The editors are sweeping rolling hills of text, picking up stray commas and misplaced apostrophes. Frame 2: Bespectacled editor notices a "thorough" that should be "through" and reaches with her litter picker to pick up the O. Frame 3: As she does, the cursor at the tip turns into a hand. Curly-haired editor yells, "Look out!" Frame 5: All we see is a flash of light. Frame 6: The editors find themselves in a jagged, windswept valley. Bespectacled editor says, "Dammit—that was a link!"
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(See the mouseover text if you’re in this situation in a PDF and aren’t aware of the quick way to get back.)

A rant might not be the most auspicious way to start a new year, but the 2023 Acrobat interface change has effectively doubled the time it takes me to input my proofing markup, and I want to talk about it, dammit. The changes started rolling out in March 2023 but didn’t affect me till the fall.

I was debating whether my old brain is now just inflexible to change but have concluded that, no, Adobe has, in fact, created a worse user experience for those of us who use Acrobat as professional proofreaders.

If you’re not already familiar with the changes to Acrobat (including Acrobat Reader), check out Adrienne Montgomerie’s orientation video for a summary. (And see their PDF Markup Basics demo for an excellent primer on how proofreaders tend to use Acrobat’s tools.)

Some proofreaders might have a different workflow from mine—especially if they use stamps to mark up. My clients have expected me to use the built-in annotation and commenting tools, and in the new interface I’ve come across several points of friction that have contributed to my frustration. Continue reading “Hazardous cleanup”

Advanced Acrobatics: Tips and tricks for PDF mark-up—Adrienne Montgomerie (EAC conference 2014)

Are you still proofreading on paper? More and more clients are looking to do away with the printing and couriering costs associated with paper proofs and are asking proofreaders to mark up changes in PDF. Editor, trainer, and volunteer extraordinaire Adrienne Montgomerie showed us how to do this with the tools in the free Adobe Acrobat Reader. Their handout from their session is here, and they have also compiled a Storify of their session here. Both of these resources are probably more useful than this write-up, but I still wanted to share some of my main takeaways from the talk.

Acrobat (the Standard and Pro versions, which you have to pay for) does have an “edit” function, but that lets you make changes directly to the document. What we’re talking about here is mark-up: using the program’s drawing or annotation tools to mark up changes that have to be made to the native file. Because PDFs are a fixed format that look the same to everyone, they’re ideal for marking up not only proofs of print materials but also websites, presentations, YouTube videos, and anything else you can capture in a screen shot.

Montgomerie uses a stylus and a Wacom tablet, which some people may find more intuitive than a traditional mouse for marking up a proof. “I prefer PDFs to paper,” they said, “because I can blow up the proof to any size. I can move my marks and resize them. I can right-click on my marks and change their properties, including weight and colour.”

“I use in blue in my mark-up,” they continued, “because I think it’s less threatening.”

Two main ways of adding mark-up to a PDF are to use either the drawing tools, where you essentially use an e-pencil to directly emulate the proofreading mark-up you’d make on paper, or Acrobat’s own annotation tools (Comment & Markup), which track your insertions, deletions, replacements, and highlights. Drawing tools are especially handy for marking up graphic novels and screen shots, where the text may not be recognizable. Be aware that for layered text, text selection for the annotation tools isn’t perfect; sometimes Acrobat chooses the wrong layer.

You can add clarifications or instructions to the designer using the Callout tool. Before sending the proof back, you can run a spell check on all of your text boxes; designers can then copy and paste that text into the source file rather than risk introducing errors by rekeying.

Different designers have different preferences, so ask your clients what they’d prefer. Whichever method you choose, all of your changes will be logged in Acrobat’s Comments List. The Comments List is excellent for quality control (especially because some of the annotation mark-up can be hard to see):

  • A designer can check off the checkbox next to each comment once a change has been implemented.
  • You can sort the Comments List by page order, date entered, checkmark status, type, and reviewer. You can also show or hide certain types of comments.
  • If you’ve got only a handful of changes, you can print only those pages with changes, along with their comments, so that the designer doesn’t have to scan through the whole document.
  • The designer can also reply to each comment, allowing for two-way communication. Sometimes a change can’t be made, and the proofreader needs to know about it for the next round of proofing.

Through the Comment & Markup tools, you can also “Attach a File as a Comment,” which is useful for long inserts. Sometimes clients won’t notice these files, though, so Montgomerie will often send them as email attachments as well.

If you’re using the drawing tools, you can make your life easier by creating or downloading a set of stamps that have your most common proofreading marks. Each stamp comes up as one comment, so if you have a caret (^) plus a hyphen (=), say, the designer doesn’t have to wade through both marks as separate comments. (Mind you, if you manage to draw both in quick succession, Acrobat may recognize them as a single mark as well.)

Under the Select & Zoom tools is the Snapshot tool, which lets you isolate a portion of your page. You can also use it to print (File » Print » Print Selection/Selected Graphic) just those isolated sections—handy if you have a tabloid document but a letter-sized printer, for example.

I wondered if anyone had ever used Annotations for Adobe InDesign, which is a plugin that lets a designer accept or reject annotation changes that a proofreader has marked up in a PDF. Nobody in the room seemed to have used it, and I’m still curious about it. (Maybe InCopy has obviated this tool, but not everyone wants to buy or subscribe to InCopy.)