# I HATE Adobe!!



## Andy (Aug 25, 2002)

Every time I get something from someone in Adobe format I cringe!!

How do you cut and paste, save it as a word doc, or just make a copy???


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## Badrabbit (Nov 18, 2004)

Andy said:


> Every time I get something from someone in Adobe format I cringe!!
> 
> How do you cut and paste, save it as a word doc, or just make a copy???


Press the button at the top that looks like am 'I' with an arrow pointing to it (it should be to the right of the hand). This is the text cursor and you should be able to use it to cut and paste.

You can also save as text from the file menu. You can then open this text file in Word and save it from Word into doc format.


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## Andy (Aug 25, 2002)

Badrabbit:

THANKS, but I don't see an icon like that! ?? There is something that says "Select Text" but it doesn't do anything.


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## juniper (Aug 20, 2006)

Andy said:


> Every time I get something from someone in Adobe format I cringe!!
> 
> How do you cut and paste, save it as a word doc, or just make a copy???


(With my PDF consultant hat on)

PDF was intended as a format for the exchange of documents suitable for viewing on screen (at various resolutions) and printing (at various resolutions) and to retain all formatting information exactly.

Thus, it was originally not intended to be cut and pasted from, and certainly not edited.

More recently, some concessions have been made to newer versions of the format to facilitate this kind of thing, but they are by no means universal.

To answer specifically:

To cut and paste: will work with some text in some documents. Select text using the selection tool in Acrobat reader.

To convert to Word format: Buy a program which does that task, or ask the person to send the original document (assuming it was written in Word).


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## Badrabbit (Nov 18, 2004)

Andy said:


> Badrabbit:
> 
> THANKS, but I don't see an icon like that! ?? There is something that says "Select Text" but it doesn't do anything.


Go to the menu at the top and select Tools> Basic> Select. That should give you the tool you need.


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## ksinc (May 30, 2005)

juniper said:


> To convert to Word format: Buy a program which does that task, or ask the person to send the original document (assuming it was written in Word).


or try to find a freebie/shareware version

google "pdf word converter" brings up hits from tucows.com and download.com

15 free uses: https://www.tucows.com/preview/419883


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## Andy (Aug 25, 2002)

juniper:

Good. How do I just make a copy???


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## Andy (Aug 25, 2002)

Badrabbit said:


> Go to the menu at the top and select Tools> Basic> Select. That should give you the tool you need.


When I do that nothing happens! I get the "select text" but I can't do anything!


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## juniper (Aug 20, 2006)

Andy said:


> juniper:
> 
> Good. How do I just make a copy???


Click the Blue Floppy Disc icon in the bar of icons at the top, if the document has been opened in a browser.

If it's opened in a seperate window (rather than inside the browser window), you can also use the File --> Save As option from the menu.


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## Andy (Aug 25, 2002)

juniper said:


> Click the Blue Floppy Disc icon in the bar of icons at the top, if the document has been opened in a browser.
> 
> If it's opened in a seperate window (rather than inside the browser window), you can also use the File --> Save As option from the menu.


Saved it, but as Adobe and it still won't print! ??


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## mikeber (May 5, 2004)

Andy, what you probably have (and most of us have as well since it is free for download) is the Adobe Acrobat reader. You may need the Adobe Elements. Check this link:
https://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/matrix.html
I agree with you, it is another bait and switch. Adobe became the internet standard de-facto with everyone using them (I don't get why. Yes, they use less memory, but so what)?


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## Badrabbit (Nov 18, 2004)

Andy said:


> When I do that nothing happens! I get the "select text" but I can't do anything!


It could be that it is a scanned document and the program doesn't see actual text but instead sees a picture. Sometimes the OCR feature can read the text and save it into a text file but I am not sure the OCR is available in Reader (I use acrobat). Perhaps some of Juniper's suggestions or Ksinc's suggested program may work (depending on whether or not it has a virtual OCR).

If it is not confidential, you can send it to me and I will try to convert it for you.


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## Andy (Aug 25, 2002)

Badrabbit said:


> It could be that it is a scanned document and the program doesn't see actual text but instead sees a picture. Sometimes the OCR feature can read the text and save it into a text file but I am not sure the OCR is available in Reader (I use acrobat). Perhaps some of Juniper's suggestions or Ksinc's suggested program may work (depending on whether or not it uses a virtual OCR).


That makes a lot of sense!! It describes the problems clearly and the fact that I have been able (in the past) to work with some of the Adobe I've received!!


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## Andy (Aug 25, 2002)

mikeber said:


> Andy, what you probably have (and most of us have as well since it is free for download) is the Adobe Acrobat reader. You may need the Adobe Elements. Check this link:
> https://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/matrix.html
> I agree with you, it is another bait and switch. Adobe became the internet standard de-facto with everyone using them (I don't get why. Yes, they use less memory, but so what)?


I wonder why everyone thinks Adobe is such hot stuff?


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## juniper (Aug 20, 2006)

Andy said:


> Saved it, but as Adobe and it still won't print! ??


The person who creates the PDF file can set a flag which prevents anyone from printing it, or from printing it without a specific password. Presumably they have done that.


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## Badrabbit (Nov 18, 2004)

juniper said:


> The person who creates the PDF file can set a flag which prevents anyone from printing it, or from printing it without a specific password. Presumably they have done that.


In which case you have just a few options, remove the protection with a program or you can take screen shots of the document and print them. This will not look great but will at least give you a paper document.


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## Andy (Aug 25, 2002)

Gentlemen:

THANK YOU! Going to get it by FAX!!

What a great website and Forums!! :icon_smile_big:


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## 16412 (Apr 1, 2005)

Is it possible to open it in msword or wordperfect?

There might be a list of conversions to try in msword or wordperfect.


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## JDC (Dec 2, 2006)

Andy, the only people who think Acrobat is hot stuff are Unix/Linux/etc admins, who're stuck trying to communicate with the 90+% of the world who use Windows.

But you're right, Acrobat is a royal PITA, especially to dialup internet users. Adobe first got PDF's foot in the door and then started implementing "protection" which allows people to control (at least theoretically) who can copy, print etc. these documents. In the real world, 1000 different utilities exist which strip PDF files of this "protection". You just need to either visit some shady areas of the net, or fork over some money to get one of these utilities.


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## Kav (Jun 19, 2005)

I was chief field excavator after the City of Santa Barbera discovered an old 'rrigation' system of tiled adobe. I was greatfull for the income but knew my report would consist of mostly- crap.Cyber Adobe is about the same. Documents used to be delivered with stamps,seals and coloured ribbons. To those day's memory I can only offer this bit of custom. Pour yourself 2 fingers of Scotch while reading.


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## jbmcb (Sep 7, 2005)

For those unafraid of the command line:

Download the command line utility xPdf from here:
https://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html

Unzip, fire a command line up and change to the directory you unzipped to

Run this from the command line:

pdftotext <name of PDF file> <name of text file>

It spits out a nice, unformatted text file. If you add -layout after the command it tries to save the format.


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## dpihl (Oct 2, 2005)

*Waaaay after the fact...*

Gentlemen, I wonder if you might understand this whole thing better if you look at it from my perspective.

I worked for Kinko's for about six years. In that time, I had hundreds of thousands of people bring me documents on disk.

If the documents were on a floppy disk, there was more than a fifty per cent chance that the floppy disk would be unreadable by any of the seven computers in the building. Apple abolished the floppy drive from their computers, and so we bought an Imation Super Drive. Problem solved.

If the documents were in MS Word format, there was a more than eighty per cent chance that the document would be either unreadable, or altered in some way. Font substitutions were by far the most common problem, but there were plenty of other problems to go around.

Most of the time, the customer would pretend to look at the sample printout, and sign off on the proof. Hours after taking delivery of the job, they would come back in and complain.

Most of the time they would accuse us of deliberately changing their document on them.

As if I had anything to do with Microsoft, or with Word, or with programming of any kind.

Anyway, the Word docs were always brought in by novices, so maybe you could expect better from the pro graphic designers. Right?

Well, yes and no.

Most graphic designers used Quark Xpress back then, with a small handful of holdouts supporting Page Maker. Microsoft Publisher wasn't even a blip on the map.

Competent graphic designers knew that font substitutions were a problem, so they usually brought the fonts with them on a CD ROM. Never mind that they were post script fonts, which seem to be prone to corruption for some unexplained reason.

Linked graphic files were far and away the worst problem with Quark Xpress, and that's where we were constantly tearing our hair out.

The graphics you see in Quark are a screen resolution mock-up of what the finished product will look like. When you send the job to print, the computer is supposed to call for a graphic that resides in the such-and-such folder on such-and-such hard disk.

If you don't link to a graphic found in a folder on Kinko's hard disk, then you have to expect that the low resolution graphic is the one that will print.

Most of the time, people remembered to bring along most of the linked graphics. A very small number of our customers even had the graphics together in one folder, with an intuitive name on the folder.

One customer had the bright idea to create a disk image, place the images folder on the desktop, and burn that disk image onto a CD. Thus, the images folder appeared on the desktop of the Kinko's computer. When Quark Xpress tried to locate the graphic files in the images folder on the desktop, it found them and printed the document correctly.

Even I couldn't screw up *that* print job!

Adobe has been pushing the Acrobat format for a good many years. Word Perfect used to promote a competing platform, but Adobe has won the hearts and minds of printers and designers around the globe.

Acrobat is designed to simplify the exchange of documents between computers. That's the whole point of Acrobat.

If you don't have Acrobat, you cannot create Acrobat files. This is no different from any other software title. You have to buy it if you want to use it, unless you are beta testing something. I include any shareware, freeware, and open source software in the beta category, even if that's going to ruffle a few feathers.

If you do have Acrobat, you can open a document from anyone else in any part of the world, and not worry about the many problems associated with moving files between computers.

Do you have the Japanese Language Kit installed on your computer? If not, perhaps you get a bunch of un-intelligible characters on your screen when you bring up a Japanese web site.

Do you have the Petrucci font on your computer? If not, any sheet music created in Finale will be unreadable to your computer. You may be able to force the document open in another program, but you will only see gobledy -****.

Do you have the ITC Dingbats font installed on your computer? If not, you may find that certain documents look funny when you try to open or print them.

Do you have the Copperplate Bold typeface installed on your computer? You might still be able to open the document, but the margins are probably going to go all kaplooey. Not to mention the careful wrapping of lines that seems to occupy so much of a layout artist's time.

I don't expect you to understand all the intricacies of Pantone's PMS color match system, Multiple Master Fonts, Glyphs, Leading, Kerning, and so forth. But I do expect you to admit that you can see the difference between a professionally created advertisement (or sign), and one that was thrown together by an amateur.

With Acrobat, you can expect a document to print the way it looked when you printed it on your own computer-- the one you were using when you created the document.

Best of all, you don't even need to own Acrobat to open, view, or print a document. All you need is the freebie program called Acrobat Reader.

This is the same as Power Point Viewer, and so forth.

You bet I'm a proponent of Acrobat. It lets you see on your own computer what problems exist with your document before anybody else sees the document at all. You can plan on how it will print, and can print a proof at home before heading off to the printer.

I don't know if there are many offset printers left in the US who will accept any format other than PDF (portable document format).

Anything else wastes the time of the production people at all levels.

That you were having difficulty copying and pasting, Andy, makes sense to me. Acrobat was designed to create a fossilized version of whatever you are looking at. It's difficult to turn a fossil back into a living thing.

Adobe has made strides in un-fossilizing a PDF file, but it takes effort to do anything of that sort.

I trust you got your project done last March, and have moved on with your life.

Just wanted to give you a bit of perspective, so maybe you won't get so red faced and angry next time you receive a PDF file.


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## Infrasonic (May 18, 2007)

*Alternatives!*

I


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## jackmccullough (May 10, 2006)

We've been using Acrobat more than ever lately. Partly it's because the Vermont Supreme Court has just started requiring electronic filing of briefs (they haven't reduced the number of hard copies we have to file, but maybe that will come next) and partly because when we share our word-processed documents with outside people converting to PDF will protect the metadata.

Also, we use WordPerfect, and using Acrobat is easier than dealing with the complaints we get when people don't know how to convert WP documents to Word.

Now, if you really want to get me started I can tell you about how much I hate Word . . .


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## ksinc (May 30, 2005)

I'm struck by the arrogance and hypocrisy of the government entities that oppose M$ Word as an official format for documents, but adopt Adobe formats. As a follower of all things business and technology, I saw some earnest intellectual integrity in the XML & openDOC type format arguments. At least those were sincere, if even mis-guided (not sure they were). However, if .gov has thrown in the towel, then why swim against the current of the defacto business standard? It just makes no sense at all to me. Oh well ... At least more "productivity centric" government entities like the SEC have the right idea with BRXML. Let the 'busy work' and WPA types proceed with wasting more time and money. All the lawyers using WordPefect and proprietary secure-mail for document storage is another great example. Only government employees and lawyers would think they had better ideas than Xerox, Oracle, and IBM (DocuSend, DocuStore, & DocuShare).


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## jackmccullough (May 10, 2006)

Aside from mere personal preference developed from years of use (my favorite version was actually WP 5.1 for DOS), I can summarize the key to the superiority of WordPerfect over Word in two words: Reveal Codes.


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## ksinc (May 30, 2005)

jackmccullough said:


> Aside from mere personal preference developed from years of use (my favorite version was actually WP 5.1 for DOS), I can summarize the key to the superiority of WordPerfect over Word in two words: Reveal Codes.


Do I try to argue the law with you? 

Reveal codes is a way to troubleshoot a problem only found with WordPerfect document formatting - specifically referred to as 'widows and orphans' in top-down procedural lingo.

M$ Word does not have this problem, as it uses document flow tags which are more consistent with human work flows. M$ and other companies studied this extensively with user and usability testing.

If you want to see the formatting tags in M$ Word you can show them using Tools.Options.Formatting Marks.Show All. Reveal Codes does not exist because it does not use codes it uses formatting marks or tags, just like every other modern WYSIWYG document formatting system - like Pagemaker. WordPerfect is not WYSIWYG. Therefore it needs reveal codes so users can figure out why their documents don't print like they appear on the screen. WP was state-of-the art in about 1985.

I hate to be a snob, but nobody that understands coding uses WordPerfect 'codes' and it is not "superior". Almost nobody "in business" uses it either.

My Father (just turned 60) was one of the last WP holdouts still keeping an original IBM PC, replete with green monotone terminal and IBM ProPrinter next to his laptop. He even used DrawPerfect for slides. Even he finally saw the light about six or seven years ago when he started self-publishing his books instead of having them typeset by Jossey-Bass. He also had a professional preference for his personal letters being on that really expensive stock with gold leaf lettering and having impact type as though they were hand-typed. He gave that up when he discovered the networked, color, all-in-one plugged into his DSL router that my Mother uses to print proofs of the pictures she takes on her camera before she Kodak-Sharepoints them with her ~80 yr old Mom on her laptop. My Mother also thinks I am very handsome. LOL


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## Howard (Dec 7, 2004)

Sometimes I don't like documents in pdf format,I like my documents in Microsoft Word.


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## jackmccullough (May 10, 2006)

ksinc said:


> Do I try to argue the law with you?
> 
> Reveal codes is a way to troubleshoot a problem only found with WordPerfect document formatting - specifically referred to as 'widows and orphans' in top-down procedural lingo.
> 
> ...


Fair enough.

You're not the first person who has explained to me why Reveal Codes isn't needed in Word. Unfortunately, this explanation is based on the assumption that your formatting can never get screwed up in Word in some way that you can't figure out just by looking at the screen.

My experience with Word (which is fairly extensive, since I had to use Word for a book I wrote, so I spent many, many hours with it over several years) was that there were many occasions where the formatting on the screen was not what I wanted, there was no way to see the command that was causing it to be screwed up, and I didn't have Reveal Codes, which would have enabled me to easily solve the problem. It's been a couple of years since I finished the book, but if I recall correctly, one of the biggest problems, which I'm not sure we ever fixed, had to do with the numbering of endnotes; I don't recall if it was that the numbers got screwed up partway through a chapter, or the font the numbers were in suddenly got really tiny for no apparent reason, but it was something like that, and if I'd had Reveal Codes I could have figured it out.

On the other hand, I have to give Word credit for one thing that I could never do in WordPerfect. Partway through the writing process the publisher told us that we had to have our notes in the form of endnotes at the end of each chapter, and I had started doing it in WordPerfect using footnotes. It might be possible, but I was never able to find a way in WordPerfect to do a wholesale change of all the footnotes to endnotes, but it was an easy, one-step operation in Word.

And far be it from me to argue with your mother about how handsome you are!


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## ksinc (May 30, 2005)

jackmccullough said:


> Fair enough.
> 
> You're not the first person who has explained to me why Reveal Codes isn't needed in Word. Unfortunately, this explanation is based on the assumption that your formatting can never get screwed up in Word in some way that you can't figure out just by looking at the screen.


Your previous 'explainer' did a poor job and perhaps did not understand the paradigm shift of WYSIWYG editors. It is certainly not based on any assumption of that kind. No matter. Good Luck!


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## Andy (Aug 25, 2002)

Informative discussion! Maybe my computer literate tastes are too simple for adobe!

I just like to cut and paste!! :icon_smile_big:


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## rip (Jul 13, 2005)

All users seem to have their own idea of what is "good". Reminds me of the arguments between PC and Mac users, or, in the day, between WordPerfect and MS Word users. There needs to be some standard of document formatting for transfer between different platforms and systems. Adobe is coming very close with the PDf format, much as TIFF and JPEG have become the standards of image transfer. One needs to always have the latest version of Adobe Acrobat reader and, preferably, Acrobat Pro, which allows easy saves and printing from the document. Nothing is, or, IMO, should be, designed for those who choose to lag two or three generations behind. Backwardly compatible, yes, but not stuck in the past. This concept may be very difficult, even antithetical for trads on this forum. For them, I suggest Xerox (as in copiers) and snail-mail of hard-copy forms.


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## Martinis at 8 (Apr 14, 2006)

There are certain times I "burn" my written documents with Adobe Acrobat Standard so that they may not be copied or printed. Adobe PDF documents have this as a useful feature.

M8


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

Martinis at 8 said:


> There are certain times I "burn" my written documents with Adobe Acrobat Standard *so that they may not be copied or printed*. Adobe PDF documents have this as a useful feature.
> 
> M8


Well, there is a way to get by this protection. My friend knows how to do it, good thing he wears a white hat. :icon_smile_wink:


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## Acct2000 (Sep 24, 2005)

What kind of suits does he wear with the white hat?


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## ksinc (May 30, 2005)

Laxplayer said:


> Well, there is a way to get by this protection. My friend knows how to do it, good thing he wears a white hat. :icon_smile_wink:


LOL yeah my Dad tried to tell me the same thing about his mp3s of his seminars.


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## Laxplayer (Apr 26, 2006)

forsbergacct2000 said:


> What kind of suits does he wear with the white hat?


A tuxedo, just like a penguin.


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## Bob Loblaw (Mar 9, 2006)

Infrasonic said:


> I


Seconded. I came in here to recommend Foxit myself.


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## Martinis at 8 (Apr 14, 2006)

Laxplayer said:


> Well, there is a way to get by this protection. My friend knows how to do it, good thing he wears a white hat. :icon_smile_wink:


This is true. One could always transcribe also. Nevertheless it serves as a deterrent. Best protection however is a copyright with a lawsuit :icon_smile_wink:

Cheers,

M8


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