PDF for Lawyers

Adobe Acrobat - videos explaining how to use it better in law practice

If you've attended any of Ernie Svenson's seminars on paperless lawyering you know he's a firm proponent of using Acrobat to work with PDFs. For those of you who want to review the benefits of Acrobat, or who want more in depth explanations of how it can help your law practice, check out these videos that Ernie created. They were done for a law school class on Practical Lawyering, but also they're useful for lawyers who want to learn how to use Acrobat better.

Bates-Stamping in Acrobat 9 Professional - Step-by-Step guide

Bates-stamping is incredibly useful for legal professionals. If you own the Professional version of Acrobat you can easily stamp a PDF document (or a batch of PDFs) with text, or sequential numbers. I put together a handy PDF guide that contains the step-by-step instructions for how to do this.

The guide won't help for Acrobat X Professional, because the initial steps are under different menus than the prior version. However, it should work for Acrobat 8 Professional. Remember, that Acrobat Standard does not have the bates-stamp feature.

Five Best PDF tools

The excellent Lifehacker weblog asked its readers to vote for their favorite PDF utilities, and then selected the five best. Here are the results:

• Foxit - available for $129 on Windows and Linux platforms
• Preview - available for free on the Mac platform
• PDF-XChange - available for $35 for the Pro version on the Windows platform
• Adobe Acrobat - available for $299 (Standard version) on Windows and Mac platform
• Nitro PDF - available for $99 on the Windows platform

Voting among the five choices listed above was pretty close, with Foxit getting 25% of the votes and Acrobat getting almost 20% of votes. Click here for the article to see the exact tally. In my view lawyers who are serious about being paperless should get at least one copy of Acrobat Pro ($499) since it allows for bates-stamping and redaction. Acrobat Standard ($299) allows OCR and commenting and markups, as well as full-fledged page manipulation.

I'm not big on alternatives to Acrobat for many reasons, one of which is that it has all of the features I'd need and it is available for Windows computers and Macs. And the program's interface looks the same on either platform.

 

Problem when printing PDF and page comes out grey?

A loyal reader named Brian Burke emailed with what appears to be a sort of common problem: sometimes when printing a PDF the resulting page comes out grey. Brian most recently had the problem when he downloaded some government forms, and then tried to print them. But he says the problem has happened with documents that he's scanned as well.

I've had the problem, but not in the past few years. So I figured I'd google for a quick answer. I used this search term: "print pdf grey background fix" and found some articles, but most of them were behind registration walls.

One suggested fix was this: "Go to View > Color/Grayscale > Grayscale. Then right-click the table and choose B/W Settings, then Black With White Fill."

I emailed Brian my google search results, and he played around and found that this worked: "Edit > Preferences > Accessibility > enable “Replace Document Colors” > enable “Custom Color” and set page background to white and document text to black."

Have any of you had this problem? And if so perhaps you could post your solution in the comments so that the next eager seeker of solutions can (hopefully) find it on this page.

Shortcut for fast PDF page navigation

Of all the shortcuts you need to know, being able to quickly jump to a particular page in a PDF is most important. Let’s say you have a 43 page PDF and you’re reviewing it with someone by phone. They ask you to jump to page 30, and you’re on page 1. How quickly can you jump to page 30?

 If you know the keyboard shortcut for quickly navigating it would take you about 2 seconds. So what’s the keyboard shortcut?

If you’re on a PC it’s: CONTROL + SHIFT + N.  On a Mac it’s COMMAND + SHIFT + N.  If you invoke this keyboard shortcut you’ll feel sort of like a piano play because it involves holding down the first two key simultaneously and then pressing the ’N’ key. Once you do that you’ll see the dialogue box depicted in the screenshot below. Then you just have to type in the page number you want to navigate to, and then press RETURN.

The more you use Acrobat the more useful you'll find it to know the shortcuts for frequently used commands. Navigation commands are the most frequently used commands when you're looking at PDFs, whether you are using Acrobat or Adobe Reader. The page navigation command is one of the most useful shortcuts to learn. 

Using Acrobat instead of Powerpoint?

Most people would never imagine that they could use Acrobat to do presentations like the ones created in Powerpoint. And many of the few who could imagine such a thing might ask "Why would I want to?" Let me address both questions, starting with the second one first.

Obviously, those of you who are adept at creating elaborate Powerpoint presentations with internal builds and clever transitions aren't going to switch to Acrobat to do a presentation. But if all you want to do is show a series of slides in sequence, with simple transitions, then listen up. 

The first step is to create a PDF document with the things you want to display in order, page-by-page. Once you have your display pages sequenced inside of one PDF, the next part is easy. If you want to set transitions between the pages, select the following menu choices ADVANCED > DOCUMENT PROCESSING > PAGE TRANSITIONS (depicted in the screenshot below).

You have choices for how quickly each transition will take (slow, medium, or fast). You can also set it up so that the pages transition automatically after a set number of seconds, and that the slideshow will only apply to a certain range of pages (see the dialogue box below).

Once you've got the transitions set to your liking, you just open the PDF and then select VIEW > FULL SCREEN MODE (or choose the shortcut: CONTROL + L on a PC, or COMMAND + L on a Mac). That's it. Dead simple to set up and use.

So, now other than simplicity why would you do this? First of all, there are less compatibility problems if you're going to be showing the slides on a computer that's not yours. Many seminar organizers will require attendees to send in their slides beforehand, and then load them into the computer being used to project so that the speakers can just walk up and do their thing. More than once I've seen speakers aghast that their carefully crafted Powerpoint slides were somehow mangled, and the fonts changed into garish text. This wouldn't happen if you used a PDF file.

Ah, but you say "What if the seminar presenters don't have Acrobat on their computer?" Well, that would be a problem. But if they have Adobe Reader then you could use that. Since the Reader program is free to download, just make it a point to tell them to load that on the computer and you'll be good to go.
And, lastly, I should point out that while you can't do builds within a slide, you can embed a movie file if you want (see example below).

You have to use the "multimedia" tool in Acrobat which will take the movie file, convert to Flash, and then embed it. When you get to that slide you just have to click on the "Play" icon and the movie will play. You can then proceed on to the next slide. 

I've even been able to use wireless remotes to advance slides on my Mac computer; but I can't vouch for how this works on Windows  computers so test it before your talk and see if that works for you.

Bookmarks & sticky notes: learn to make 'em fast

I will keep harping on this because it matters a lot, if you want to become adept at using PDFs to be more productive that is. The reason you keep writing on paper to make notes is because it's easy and you don't have to think about it. The reason you don't use PDFs is because it's hard. Why is it hard? Because you have to think about how to do it, and right now you don't know how to do it quickly.

To make notes in Acrobat there are only two things you need to learn how to create quickly: bookmarks and sticky notes.

Think of bookmarks as those yellow tab stickies you put on pages that are in stack. You put those tab stickies there to mark where you have something important you want to look at later. In Acrobat you would create a bookmark to do this. In the graphic below you see the bookmarks panel on the left hand side (the area marked #1). Even if you don't have that panel visible you can create a bookmark with the shortcut CONTROL + B (or COMMAND + B on a Mac, which is what I am using to demonstrate this)

So to create a bookmark you just navigate to the page that you want to bookmark and invoke that command. The bookmarks panel will open and you can name the bookmark whatever you want. You can use bookmarks to break up a document into smaller documents, but that's a whole separate topic.

Now, lets talk about sticky notes. Sticky notes are akin to the marginalia you would scribble next to an important passage. In the world of paper you'd also tab those areas so you can find where you made notes. In the world of Acrobat you can open up the panel and see all your comments listed, and then you can click on any one of them to automatically navigate to that page.

Okay, so sticky notes are a lot more powerful in Acrobat than the ones you make on paper. They can also hold a lot more text than you can scrawl in the margin of a piece of paper. One thing you should know

Acrobat puts the sticky notes under the Comment menu (at least in Acrobat 9 and prior). If you click that menu you'll see (as depicted by area #2 in the graphic above) that the first choice is "Add Sticky Notes." And if you look over to the right you'll see that the shortcut for doing this is COMMAND +6 on a Mac (or CONTROL + 6 on a PC).

So let's review "B" is for bookmarks, and "6" (middle of the keyboard row of numbers) is for creating sticky notes. If you're on a Mac put one finger on the key to the left or right of the space bar (that's the COMMAND key) and then pick a 'B' or '6'. If you're on a PC put your finger on the outermost key from the spacebar (that's the CONTROL key) and then pick a 'B' or '6'.

Practice that until it becomes second nature. Then start weaning yourself from using paper notes; they're inefficient, and they're holding you back.

 

More on PDF/A

As we discussed back in mid-November, federal courts are in the process of moving their e-filing standard from PDF to the long-term archival standard known as PDF/A. There were some good comments to that post, which tells me that this is a topic of great interest to this blog's readers. I assume most of you know about Rick Borstein's excellent blog: Acrobat for Legal Professionals. And therefore I presume many of you read his post about the federal court's move to the PDF/A standard (if not, click on the link).

As I said before, the transition isn't going to be that difficult. Also, I don't see a big need for attorneys to convert old PDF files to the new standard. If you've uploaded something to a federal court and it's been accepted as a filing you're not going to have to re-upload that file. The PDF/A standard is beneficial because it will likely retain compatibility and usability longer than regular PDF files; on the other hand, you do lose some multi-media and hyperlink functionality.

Removing PDF metadata & document markups using Acrobat

All digital documents contain metadata, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. Metadata is just hidden information about a document, usually not very interesting information. But hidden information is hard to evaluate because, well...it's hidden. Some of that hidden information could be embarrassing and some could be downright damaging. PDFs are digital documents, and hence they contain metadata. Fortunately, Adobe Acrobat gives us a way to quickly find, and delete if we choose, that hidden data. The trick is to know where to look. Unfortunately, if you look under all of the menus in Acrobat you won't find a choice labelled 'Metadata.' The command you're looking for is called "Examine Document" which is under the DOCUMENTS menu choice. See the screenshot below:

Once you select this option your PDF will open a panel on the left hand side and start to run an analysis of the document, as shown by the red arrow marked #1 below. The #2 red arrow points to the types of information that have been found. You'll note that this document contains "metadata" and "bookmarks," which would be considered a type of "markup" in Acrobat. Comments and highlighting are also considered forms of "markup."

So the next question is, obviously: how do you remove the metadata and other markups? And the answer it found next to the red #3 arrow in the screenshot below. You just click on the button that is labeled "Remove."

But before we do that let's go back and look at the left panel again because you'll note that we have choices as to what we remove. That is, it's not an all-or-nothing deal. We can cherry pick what we want to have taken out. After all, we might want to leave the bookmarks in the document. So, these are the choices:

If we're happy with the choices that are selected (in this case all) then we click that "Remove" button and Acrobat will purge all of that information. But, the changes aren't locked in yet. If you look in the lower left hand area you'll see this important notification:

Once you save the document (or save it as a new document, if you prefer) then the changes will be locked in. So that's how you get rid of metadata, and comments and bookmarks. Frankly, I think it would have been better if Adobe had put these tools in the same area where you examine the document properties (which we talked about in the last two posts). It seems to me that once you shouldn't have to go to two different places to "examine the document." In Acrobat X the process is a little easier to find because the command is labelled "Remove Hidden Information" as the screenshot below depicts:

I hope that helps folks understand how to use this important tool in Acrobat. It's features like this that make me cringe when I hear lawyers recommending some less expensive alternative to Acrobat. Yes, I realize that Acrobat is a costly tool. But it's also a very powerful one, and versatile as well. Lawyers who want to have the options to sanitize documents and do all sorts of other important tasks should spend less time worrying about saving a few dollars and more time learning how to take advantage of all the useful features in Acrobat. What's that saying about "Penny wise and pound foolish"? Final note: The ability to remove metadata is part of Acrobat versions 8 and above.

Examining a PDF's Document Security

In the previous post we discussed how to examine a PDF’s document properties, focusing on the “Description” tab. Now, we’re going to focus on the tab marked “Security.”

You’ll see three things in the graphic below that are worth noting: (1) the Security Tab is highlighted, because that’s the tab we’re focused on, (2) the “Security Method” is set to “No Security,” and (3) the summary of restrictions for this document lists all of the things that are still allowed.

 

Obviously, any of these things that are currently allowed in this document can be disallowed. That is, you can restrict a PDF so that someone can’t print, or change the document, or assemble it into another document etc. To do this you just go the area marked 2 (in the graphic above) and change the selection from “No Security” to “Password Security” at which point you will see the following dialogue box:

  

When you start imposing security on a document you wind up with a lot of choices, which I’m not going to get into right now. The main thing I wanted to show you is how to find out what kind of security has been imposed on a PDF that you are using. Whenever you have problems with a PDF the first thing you should do is examine the Document Properties, and often you will find that some sort of security has been put on it.