Friday, February 10, 2012

Google is the Manual and the Manual is Google

In program after program the online manual is missing or useless, often so badly organized that available information is unavailable. I almost convince myself that the answer does not exist, but then I remember that Google is the Manual for every application. I Google the question and find a discussion or blog post or video tutorial put up by someone who suffered through my problem last year and found the answer. For every hundred questions I get answered about software, the manual or help feature provide five answers, and Google provides the other ninety-five. To save time, I now try to remember that the Manual is Google and always start there. The actual manual and built-in or online help are weak supplements to be used only in desperation.

Friday, February 3, 2012

Apple Preview PDF Fixes

The Apple Macintosh Preview program will allow the user to fill in and save a PDF form, with a couple of oddities. If text is entered into a field and the form is saved before the field is closed, either by tabbing or clicking out of the field, the text is not saved. So, be sure to click outside the last field before saving.

If the filled form is opened in Acrobat on Windows, the text entered into fields will not appear unless one clicks into the field. A script that fixes these forms can be found here. In Acrobat Pro X, rather than adding a menu item, I extracted the heart of the script and made it an Action. (Tools --> Action Wizard --> Create New Action --> More Tools --> Execute Java Script --> Options and enter the modified script.) Now when I open a completed form with missing text in the fields, I click the new action to activate it, and a moment later all the text is visible.