PDF for Lawyers

Follow Friday: check out some other PDF resources online

There's a tradition (or maybe 'trend' is a better term) among those who use Twitter that on Fridays you suggest to your followers some good other interesting people to follow. This trend is referred to as 'Follow Friday'. I like this trend (or tradition) and so today I'm going to make use of it on this blog.

There are lots of great PDF resources out there in the blog world, and the Twitter world. One site I've always liked is Molly DiBianca's Going Paperless blog, which often focuses on PDF issues. In the Twitter world you should follow @pdfsage which is put out by Leonard Rosenthol of Adobe (check his blog too).

Incidentally, you may not realize that PDF for Lawyers also has a Twitter feed. Enjoy!

Capturing web pages with Acrobat

These days a lot of litigation requires lawyers to capture information on a website, or a web page. If you learn about online information damaging to the other side of your case you should capture it immediately. The easiest way to do this is to just go to the page in question, and 'print to PDF.'  If you have Acrobat I'm sure you know how to do this.

Let's say you want to capture the information on my law firm website (actually a blog), which is at www.svensonlaw.com. You can pull that up in your browser and then select 'print to PDF'.  The result will be a capture the output on the home page. Now you have to do this for each separate page on my site, which has 5 separate pages. Not a big deal, maybe, because my site isn't that big.

But even with a small site like mine it's a lot more efficient to simply direct Acrobat to capture the entire site.  Here's how you do that in Acrobat 9 (Standard or Pro). First go to ADVANCED > WEB CAPTURE > CREATE PDF FROM / APPEND WEB PAGE. Then you'll get a dialogue box like this.

Don't click on the CREATE button. That would yield only a capture of the home page, which is too limited. You want to capture the entire site, so click on the button to the left of the text in the lower left that says 'Capture Multiple Levels'. Once you do that you'll get a dialogue box like this:

Don't click just yet. You'll notice that here the dialogue box is set to only capture the first level. You want to get the entire site, so click that box.

The next dialogue box will warn you of the perils of trying to capture an entire site, which is reasonable because I'm sure some lawyers out there might think that they can use this tool to capture the CNN.com site. That would take a really long time and create a really large file, if it worked at all. And that's what the next dialogue box is trying to make you aware of.

So just click YES and the process will start. Just to give you an idea of how long it might take to capture a small website, it took about a minute to capture the 5 pages on my law firm website.  The result of the capture is a nicely bookmarked PDF file, which looks like this:

This is obviously much better than creating separate PDF files for each page by using the 'print to PDF' function. If you did that you'd have to merge the files into one file, which is easy to do but does involve a whole extra step. With the web capture function you can be sure that you're getting the entire site (or however many levels you choose to capture).

Granted, there are times you may have to resort to simply 'printing to PDF,' such as when you try to capture certain sites that are password protected (e.g. Facebook pages). But you can always try the web capture at one or two levels and see what happens, and then fall back on the 'print to PDF' function if you're not capturing the pages using the web capture.

As I mentioned earlier, this feature is part of Acrobat Standard and Acrobat Pro.