Continued Requests Regarding the New Interface
- May 8, 2024
- 1 reply
- 914 views
This is third installment of my requests concerning the development of Acrobat's new interface, which I'm hoping will be 'upvoted' as the other two have been. What I hope to do here is to provide a concrete example of the problem that I hope this new interface will solve for me. It concerns a book I have nearly finished (600 pages in four volumes) about a hearing child of deaf parents whose learning of English provides important evidence as to the structure of deaf sign languages, specifically American Sign Language (ASL), used by deaf people in the USA. To convince fellow linguists of the points that it makes, it has been necessary to provide many hundreds (at least 1,000) examples of his spoken sentences as a child, and of his own ASL versions as an adult of those same sentences. Given the complexity of the task, it would be far better to embed these media into the PDFs instead of linking to them. As may be well known, Acrobat's interface for video is currently under development, partly in response to the fact that a security problem was discovered in the PC version of what would have been the best video player for my purpose, which was Apple Quiicktime. Since Apple is not fixing it, Adobe is currently developing its own video player, which still leaves much to be desired as of this writing. I'm sure that process will ultimately succeed, and I am pleased to see that the current version remains stationary on the final frame, making easier for readers to continue reflecting on what they have just watched. Frame-by-frame scrolling with the arrow keys would be another highly desireable feature.
However, the main problem I face is that embedding videos is currently so tedious and time-consuming. One must specify the SAME CHOICES again and again in multiple dialogs (open in a separate window, the path the the icon to use to open it, its width and height in pixels, and so on and on. A very simple fix would save me weeks of work - months even. And when changes are needed, as inevitably happens with academic papers and books subject to peer review, the whole process must be repeated each time. The simple fix is simply to make it possible to SAVE THESE CHOICES AS DEFAULTS.
To provide a concrete example of what I'm referring to I provide five attachments below: a PDF entitled Sample.PDF, and four media files. The PDF contains links to the four media files. One of them is an audio clip of a sentence spoken by him a a child, and the others are possible ASL renditions of that same sentence performed by him years later as an adult. For the links to work, they should all be in the same folder as the PDF. (This example is more complex than most, but the average number of media files per cited sentence is about 2.5.)
