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Chuck M
Explorer
Chuck M
Explorer
Activity
Jul 14, 2019
05:21 AM
Word 2019 for Dummies has a whole chapter on mail merge -- including e-mail merge. Lots of specific instructions and tips. Plus they say there's a Wizard the non-macho may wish to employ. Howsoever, they start by stating that rocket science, brain surgery and other complex topics are easier than mail merge in Word. Nevertheless... I shall persevere.
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Jul 10, 2019
09:08 AM
Sounds like the term may be e-mail merge. That moves me one step forward. Thanks.
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Jul 10, 2019
05:02 AM
For almost 2 years, my graphics work has been donated to a local nonprofit. They mostly use Microsoft Office apps. I have that plus the current Adobe CC Suite. They would like to compile a list of individuals that a bulk mailing would send nicely-styled HTML emails (with the message in the email itself, not attached to it). The emails would be individualized in the Send To field and would include the recipient's name and perhaps other specifics in the body of the email. Past e-mailings of theirs have used PDF attachments to hold the message. They weren't successful. IOW the grouped emails should look like each one was sent by the nonprofit to a single recipient, including the info relevant to that recipient. E.g., how long the recipient has supported the nonprofit. I know nothing about how that would be done, but am definitely willing to learn. Chuck M
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Jul 09, 2019
03:41 AM
The word "JavaScript" scares the hell out of me. For good reason. I do not learn code languages well. But I will review the resources you provide before initiating the process of deciding if I belong anywhere near doing Acrobat forms. Appreciate your time and expertise...
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Jul 09, 2019
03:22 AM
3. I'm hoping that means the table will be lost -- but the pieces of text content will still be positioned in Acrobat where the cells of the Word table put them. That would seem workable. This is an Adobe forum. Is there an Adobe place where I can ask my question about training courses and other learning for doing forms in Acrobat? Or a non-Adobe community that covers Acrobat? Chuck M
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Jul 09, 2019
02:58 AM
I've been doing work for the nonprofit (LEAVEN in Appleton, WI, USA) for almost 2 years. They do a remarkable job of getting pro-level work done by volunteers (in fact, many of their legions of volunteers are retired professionals doing whatever job needs doing). They absolutely respect professionals but they find ways to serve their public without using their budget for professional services. If I produce fillable PDFs for LEAVEN, I think I'll ask the local tech college to sign on to agree to carry on the work with a few updates, etc. Replace Page is brand new to me and it sounds like a big help. With a twinge of reluctance, a while back, I gave up using tables for web pages. But I'm hoping you'll say it's OK to use a table layout in the first-step version of the form in Word. Seems likely that could eliminate much of my current confusion in getting good horizontal spacing without editing content in Acrobat. I can't keep asking every new question here. Does anyone know of good detailed training in making fillable PDFs? Same goes for Word forms. Many thanks. Many hours were wasted before I found my way here...
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Jul 08, 2019
12:50 PM
I'm trying to draw bottom lines out of your help. And this may be my last message. What you're describing are not form fields, but static text, which you've attempted to edit in Acrobat. You should not do that. One of the mini-tutorials said if I want to edit the text content, choose Tools > Create & Edit > Edit PDF. If I want to work with the fields, choose Tools > Forms and Signatures > Prepare Form. Your rec, I think, is simpler and smarter: Don’t edit text in Acrobat. You need to create all non-interactive elements before creating the PDF, and then add the form fields in Acrobat. Got it. You can use the form detection wizard, but the results are usually far from perfect and require quite a bit of manual changes. May explain all the erratic results I saw – glitches that forced text editing in Acrobat. Do not bother adding form fields in Word. They won't be picked up by Acrobat and you'll need to re-create them from scratch. Got it. If one needs 3 or 4 choices on 1 line, maybe the Word file should only have the initial text beginning the line -- and no text for the choices, which only need fields. Remaining questions: How should I add white space between choice items? (Presumably in Word, though if that’s off-topic here, I can Google.) You said: “You need to create all non-interactive elements before creating the PDF, and then add the form fields in Acrobat.” Does that mean that if the nonprofit client adds or subtracts something (which is a virtual inevitability, often a serial inevitability) this fillable form has to be remade using a revised Word file to which in Acrobat are manually added 22 text fields and about 16 check boxes and radial boxes, all named and grouped? Right? To me that’s a deal killer. Creating the fillable form, 1 st generation, seems a labor-intensive load for me. OK if the use of it is all downhill. But their modifying it when I’m gone is far beyond the skills & time available to the nonprofit staff. It’s fun to investigate neat ideas, but it turns into pain if you don't know when to walk away. Chuck M
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Jul 08, 2019
09:13 AM
Acrobat says Word docs can be a start to a fillable form. That's good because the Word docx can easily produce a non-fillable form (they have a use for them) and taking it into Acrobat yields the fillable. I did a form in Word (using line spacing and space above paragraph) and was fine with the appearance. I didn't know if check boxes and radio buttons should be added in Word and "repeated" in Acrobat, so I'm trying it both ways,.The test form has 2 large text boxes. One called for a signature. And the auto recog added all the text fields. The other had no sig, and fields weren't added. So I added a "bogus" temporary signature, the fields were added, and then edited in Acrobat to remove the text and line for Signature. About 20 text fields were added with auto recognition. It wasn't hard to size them appropriately, but it was hard to get them aligned properly. Both horizontally and vertically spaced evenly. I suspect Acrobat has line spacing for text, but I haven't found it yet. The most troublesome changes were that sections I had assembled in Word in a single text box were in Acrobat broken up into 6 or more individual random-looking text boxes. They consisted of an intro sentence plus a 2nd line containing text only (no boxes) for the multiple choices. I took a deep breath and put them back the way they should be. Saved the Acrobat file.Looked at the screen and Acrobat had broken them up again. Including putting words from 2 different items or questions in the same text box.Maybe I angered Acrobat by using too many word spaces. The choices had to be spaced apart to have room for a check box or radio button. And to look right. Tabs were too erratic for spacing. I don't know if Acrobat has fixed spaces. So I used 10 word spaces between choices. Wrong? When I add a radio button in the middle of a line, the icon and associated text are positioned about 1/2 line space above the rest of the line. In properties or someplace, I could shift it down but then the text would be trimmed at the bottom before it was even vertically with the rest. That's all for now...
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Jul 08, 2019
08:05 AM
My graphics work is donated to a local nonprofit agency. They have asked for forms that can be filled out online or on computer. The most promising app I've found is Acrobat DC Pro in my student suite. I find lots of short tutorials on how to do fillable fields, etc. But I don't find any overview that addresses the problems I have repeatedly. Brevity says I shouldn't list them but I can if asked. My early bottom line is that it is not a good idea to do fairly complex forms in Acrobat. Because the app will change what I create on the page. Love to be wrong.
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May 01, 2019
02:08 AM
What you say is true enough. Though I claim an exception for this project and for myself. The site is between 8 and 12 years old. It hasn't been touched for any editing for 8 years. And it has served my friend's small business loyally for all 96 months. He doesn't intend to use it for the next 5 years. He wants it to show current content -- and last for a year or two. When I worked on reworking the site from another purpose 8 years ago, I was trying to be a web developer. I was making the site function largely through trial & error, more that I was getting it built right. Shortly after the site went live, I totally gave up web intentions and/or pretensions. Went back to graphic design. Now he has told me that his business has changed, and chunks of the content have to be changed. The design and style should remain unchanged -- just make it 2019 accurate. He asked that I come out of web retirement and do the changes. We informally have a budget in mind, about 20-25% of normal charges. When I got into the content revisions, I realized (and told him) how shoddy the job was that I produced 8 years ago. Two-thirds of my time now has gone into fixing mistakes and omissions. They are not in the budget, but I do not wish to simply repeat my "sins" of 8 years ago. So I contribute the time. To make the site better -- perfection isn't on the table. Reworking pages to avoid obsolete usages isn't on the table. I'll gamble they will work for another year or so. I am about to delve into a brand new ref work by Flavio Copes he calls The CSS Handbook. It prints at 36 pages and has tons of stuff I can use if I am able to learn. We'll see. If my speed & competency improve, I will venture to do a little more with the site. But not at the cost of being pragmatic. Chuck M
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Apr 30, 2019
09:56 AM
I am happy and sad that I brought the problem here. I've used your answers to fix the code on this page. And now have a dozen or 3 dozen other pages to do similar. Thanks to both of you. I also am a partial user of the W3C validation offered in Dreamweaver. I'm thinking the yellow errors are more serious. Right? But some of the others seem functionally significant too. I take care of those. But I must admit that the errors that point out that pieces of code are obsolete I pass over. Neither the website nor yours truly are expected to last forever. A practitioner named Flavio Copes today offered a new free CSS Handbook. 36 pages when I printed it out. I like what I've seen. That will be my lunch reading. And my reading for a rather long time afterwards... If I succeed with it, not a given, there will be fewer obsolete errors in my pages. Chuck M
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Apr 30, 2019
08:42 AM
In DW 2019, in split view, I show "must be escaped" errors for the character "<" when it's used in part of a standard tag. Can I tell DW to ignore it? Or do I tell myself to ignore it? An example: <td style="padding: 24px 23px 4px 0;"> <img src="images/authsuppprov62.gif" alt="HP logo" border="0" width="73" height="120" </a></td> DW's complaint seems to be about the "<" in <img
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Jan 26, 2018
04:41 PM
Partial results: I hid about 100 fonts. Restarted. Publisher did a definitely better job. But not a complete job. With a 16 font family, Aileron, Pub saw 10 of them. And seemed to get the names right, which is new. Not sure how much time I will take to probe further. There are other things to do. The local tech college has a Publisher instructor on faculty. Will try to see him.
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Jan 26, 2018
10:23 AM
Early evidence suggests that my Myriad Pro year 2005 Open Type fonts were causing another problem. Working with them in Photoshop and Illustrator (current versions) strangely caused the Windows system font (used in Desktop, apps and elsewhere) to change to dingbats. Happened commonly. Required a restart. Then back to work and would happen again. I've now hidden all 28 of the Myriad Pro fonts in Fonts. Still working in Photoshop, with other fonts. There have been no occurrences of dingbats. 1. This weekend I plan to reduce the number of my active fonts from almost 300 to under 100. See if that helps MS Publisher deal with recognizing them correctly. Probably not but time will tell. 2. Am also trying to find another sans serif semi-condensed family that my client will like. So far, Publisher gives the families I've installed the same shoddy treatment it gives Myriad Pro. Will post here again only if there are some positive results others might benefit from.
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Jan 24, 2018
10:51 AM
Google took me to the MS site. They offered a full fix for Office 365. I took it and it seemed to include an Office reinstall. But you're right. Made no difference. Will give this particular client a choice between InDesign with the Myriad Pro Semi-condensed Semibold font they're used to (the short term solution) and Publisher with a slightly different font (longer term compatibility). It does seem that MS doesn't value Publisher. They sorta act like they might soon drop it. And replace with nothing? I don't think I'll want to design pages in Word. AFAIK images in Word are always linked to a piece of text. To me, that's a bad idea. By tomorrow I'll mark this as ANSWERED. Chuck M
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Jan 24, 2018
08:05 AM
Thanks. All 28 are labelled OpenType font file. (They probably were Postscript at first, but decades ago I updated them once or twice when I was still on a Mac. All/most give year 2005. Have no license info to try updating them now.) In looking for substitution fonts, I installed DejaVu Sans. Less than half of the family show in Publisher. 1. Think I should try to get Office 365 to reinstall Publisher. 2. "Fonts" says I have 280 fonts installed in my up-to-date Windows 10 HP laptop with 16 gig of memory. Many are free fonts. Could they be fighting among themselves? I could try turning off the added ones as a test, IF I could tell which ones need to be left active.. Chuck M
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Jan 23, 2018
10:02 AM
I've had the fonts for over 20 years. The regular and condensed came with an Adobe app. I bought the semi-condensed, if memory serves, bought them from Adobe. I have the current Creative Suite. They show and work fine in those up-to-date apps. But MS Publisher (which is current and which I must use for nonprofit clients) only shows 8 of the 28 and gives them the wrong names. Behaves erratically. My new work in Publisher is supposed to match old work in InDesign, and it can't, because the Myriad Pro fonts don't work. My questions are two-fold. Is there anything I can do to make the fonts work in Publisher -- or should I accept that they won't work? Secondly, given the age of the fonts, given my switch from Mac to Windows 10, and given my moving to a new location, I have no paperwork on buying the semi-condensed 10 fonts. Typekit can't help 'cuz I didn't buy them from Typekit. I have found nothing on the Adobe site about font registration. Is there anything to be done to download the latest versions of these fonts in hope it will fix this situation?
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Jan 02, 2018
07:35 AM
This actually is a Portfolio question, but since I found no way to ask about Portfolio. Dreamweaver seemed the closest of the offered choices. Specific question: I have a student subscription to the Creative Suite. I begin a tech college course in WordPress in a couple weeks. The course requires hosting with a WordPress install. Will Portfolio or something else within the Create Suite give me hosting and allow me to install WordPress on it? I am 78 years of age. Embarked on a new "career" donating print and web work to nonprofit agencies in Appleton, Wisconsin, USA. Agencies including regular work for LEAVEN. There are questions I would like to ask Adobe about how Adobe components may be able to help me in this work. Is there a particular phone number I can call? Chuck Miller chuckmiller@new.rr.com
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Feb 20, 2017
12:24 PM
My next step will be to mark this problem as solved. We got rid of the semicolons. Dragging the URL to the desktop works fine, and the shortcut can be emailed if it's compressed first. I have a ref page to tell me how to give the shortcut icon our image as an ico file before emailing. I like this forum. Thanks to all. Chuck M
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Feb 20, 2017
08:40 AM
I don't know PHP or JavaScript. My client's Head of Service doesn't either. But he's taken on the challenge of finding them. Is there an end of "item" code I might not recognize? Which might have a semicolon after it... The page has proprietary pricing on it, so we'll defer posting it while a couple other things are tried. The website was done a decade ago. Not sure it uses a Favicon image. Could it or another image I provide be larger than the standard size for a shortcut? I'll try and see. The replies have been helpful. Any further replies are "optional."
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Feb 18, 2017
07:43 AM
** Folks don't always welcome change. One branch of my client's client said they'd go along with my client as a supplier, but only if we could give them an icon like a Windows shortcut on their desktop. One click, they said, and they want to be looking at their order page. If our website was local to their computer, that would be easy enough. But since the site is located on a hosting server, I don't know how to do that... It isn't a security problem. It's how to make a shortcut of some kind of the page at the server and get it back to a PC desktop. ** Bonus question: I just finished making the order page for them. Turned out OK as I work to adapt to the latest Dreamweaver update. Except for the spurious semicolons. There is one order form on the page (Mal's E-Commerce). Just outside the form top center there are 2 semicolons. I have spent 45 minutes trying to find and eliminate them. Searching semicolons and verifying that they're all gainfully employed. I find nothing. Live View shows them, and my cursor can select them -- but nothing is highlighted in the code view. Plus, the Live View won't let me delete them. If someone would like to see the page, I'll need to ask my client's permission Monday morning before posting a link. Chuck M
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Feb 21, 2016
04:01 AM
"combining problem - no idea what went wrong. But understand that combining JPEGs in this way is a very simple and limited way to work. For more control you'd make a multipage document in Word, InDesign, or whatever you like, and convert that to a PDF. Then you can add captions, put two or more small things on a page, or whatever. A collection of just images would seem to me a bit incomplete if I were a client. You can also combine PDFs with Acrobat. Bear in mind you should NOT directly email the result - too big, too prone to problems for which the client will blame you. Use a simple file sending site like wetransfer.com." Not trying to argue. Just looking for pragmatism. Making a document like suggested is better but it's a LOT of work just to share image possibilities. What I have done previously is set the folder of possibilities to show previews or thumbnails, Clean by Name, doing one or more screenshots, and sending those. It works, barely, but the images are small, and the white space is too plentiful. In the PDF the images are circa 10X bigger. A lack of captions is a problem, howsoever the client dealt with it. And on the next attempt I thought I'd go back into the created PDF and try adding either text or comments. (In the Acrobat class adding text worked very well.) And because I was using web-sized JPEGs (sometimes the way they came and other times an extra step for me), the file size for the 18 image PDF wasn't at all a problem. Memory tentatively thinks it was about 2mb. The JPEGs ranged from roughly 400 px to 1000 px wide. If I recall, after making the combo PDF with web settings, I used Acrobat processing to get minimum file size. In sum, the PDF I made showed the images to better advantage, my intent, and for that I'm willing to accept some shortcomings. Time will tell if further experience makes me more competent, and perhaps avoids the errors encountered in the first one. Your comment on search engines not being generic in behavior sounds spot on, even if it is inconvenient. Bet someone has done the experiments. Maybe the person who developed the technique of writing a graf or 2 of favorable text and then positioning it off screen. Folks are always looking for ways to get more out of any system.
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Feb 20, 2016
05:33 AM
I'm guessing my first question may be off the beaten path in an Acrobat forum. And my second question may sound parochial to my computer. Plus, the email notice I received from the Dreamweaver forum answers (or invalidates) my third question. Heigh ho, heigh ho, it's off to other things we go... 😉
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Feb 19, 2016
08:58 AM
I OCR-ed a pixel image and was delighted to see that the look of the image was unchanged, but that the PDF now had searchable, copyable text. And yet file size had decreased (I don't know why; a non-apparent reduction in res?). The question is: if that PDF is included on a webpage, will the Google and other search robots read that OCR-generated text? Will the originally "mute" image now deliver a message to the search engines? When I find say 18 images for possible use in illustrating a text document, I haven't had a good way to share those images with the client -- big enuf to see and easy to view. The Create > PDF from multiple files seems idea for my purpose. I'm taking an Acrobat course at the local tech college, and the multiple files PDF I made for the course worked fine. But when I added the 18 JPEGs to the multiple files window (wish Acrobat could work with PSDs) all went fine until I was ready to click Combine. Then all 18 images were labelled with the error icon (for an unknown error) and the PDF failed. I couldn't find the real reason nor could I recover, so went for 3 new PDFs with fewer images in them. That worked fine. Though the client likely would prefer handling 1 PDF to 3. I'm unsure whether too many images was the core problem because the behavior wasn't fully consistent. Is the unknown error inside Acrobat? Or might it be my old Mac Book Pro running out of RAM (it has 8 gig)? Forum question: is there a way to get an email notification when my post has been replied to? (Handy but not essential.)
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