From the Doc Side : Acrobat Reader

Forget Best-Selling Audio Books, Listen to Our User Guides for Free!

Lindsey Robbins — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 14:08:00 GMT

Did you know you could listen to our user guides read out loud for free? Well, if you have the free Adobe Acrobat Reader or even the full Adobe Acrobat installed on your Windows computer you have the ability to not only read our guides but listen to them as well. It's a little known feature that may be of use to you.

In Adobe Acrobat Reader, on the menu go to View, Read Out Loud. You can select to listen to the entire document or just the page you are on. Adobe uses the basic Windows voice settings so if you aren't able to hear anything, go to your Control Panel, Sound and Audio Devices, Audio tab. On the Audio tab, ensure you have a device selected for the sound playback.

If you want to adjust the voice or playback speed for the read out loud capability, go to Control Panel, Speech, Text to Speech tab. I personally went with Microsoft Sam on my computer, I like his deep monochromatic voice. If only they made a CP-30 voice.

Doing More with Adobe Acrobat and PDFs

Lindsey Robbins — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 15:55:00 GMT

I love research. I love it so much I research what we could be doing five years from now. I like to know things. Being prepared for upcoming changes is an understatement for me. When I went to the STC conference in June, I saw a demo of Acrobat 9. Wow, it did some slick things. However, it meant it was time to go back to the ~~drawing~~ research board. We've heard of some issues with the Technical Communication Suite that Adobe is promoting with Acrobat 9, so we aren't sure when we plan to upgrade. However, when you're researching five years out you don't worry about small details (I mean, who worries about broken software, lost files, and loss of productivity migraines?). However, this line of thought did produce some questions about what we can do with Acrobat now and what we might want to consider doing this next year, two years down the road, and five+ years down the road.

On the Documentation team, we use Adobe Acrobat as part of the process to create our user guides. Among the things we already provide in our user guides include - bookmarks, table of contents, index, cross reference links, space to make notes in the margins, and more.

A new feature we're testing on the Education Edge, Student Information System, and Financial Edge 7.77 products is a new bookmark - Search the guide. We thought we'd try to make the process to search through a PDF for your content easier. When you click Search the guide, Adobe's search feature opens and you can enter your terms. The PDF search function is pretty good and I use it often when I try to locate existing content. Instead of relying on users to know where in Acrobat to go to for the search feature, we've added the bookmark so it's visibly present when they open the PDF the first time. Simple change but yet we're hoping it improves the usability of the user guide.

For longer term research, I've been hearing about other ways to increase the functionality of the PDF. Recently I received an email about enabling PDFs for comments. In short, this feature would enable users to make comments or notes in the documentation as they use it (very web 2.0 like). I like that it takes information (user guides) our users have already said they like (in our survey) and expand its usefulness. An article from Shlomo Perets discusses some ways to enable PDF comments. For us, it would require an update to our Adobe products and with our issues in the Tech Comm Suite it's not a good decision for us to implement. While we wait for Adobe to sort out its business, I am going to introduce this idea to our usability team. We don't even know if this is a feature users would like so it's time to do some user research.

Other items I've heard about and would like to do user research include -

Information Design. Not really a cool new feature per say but I like reading blogs and articles about how people use content. We redesigned our user guides for the products on the Infinity platform. Now as our software evolves and user expectations evolve, it's good to stay current on the latest research.
Keywords. Add keywords to each PDF and then provide a way for users to search the user guides on our website. We've been looking into this for a while but have been having problems working around how we would do that with the current security settings in place (you have to login to see the user guides). Security issue aside, we have to see how this would affect our current work processes and what the return on investment would be.

However, I know we can't stop there. There is a whole field of information on readers that needs to be explored (you know, in between writing new documentation for all the millions of software product releases we have each month). I love that a part of my job is to look for new ways to enhance our documentation. So if you have any suggestions, tips, or tricks for Adobe Acrobat, please pass them on. Oh and if you have any knowledge of other tips and tricks for other PDF readers out there, I'd be glad to hear about those too. As long as the reader is free for our users, I'm willing to do the research on ways to enhance our user guides. Research on cool new user assistance features is about as cool as The Dark Knight (already one of my all-time favorite movies). In other words, it's too cool for school.

Selecting a 'Reader'

Justin Ward — Fri, 23 May 2008 14:33:00 GMT

In an upcoming release of our version 7 products, we are going to remove Adobe’s Acrobat Reader from the installation. Right now, if you do not have a Reader installed on your workstation, our install detects this and asks if you would like us to install Acrobat Reader. A ‘Reader’ is a free tool that allows you to view and print Portable Document Format (PDF) files. If you’ve ever opened a PDF online, you have some form of Reader installed. For example, you need a Reader to view the user guides on our website.

We’ve found that providing this option really isn’t necessary since nearly everyone already has a Reader installed, and because we want our users to have the latest version of their reader – something we cannot update between releases.

Available Readers
While Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is the most prominent (and most feature-rich), there are a lot of other free Readers out there as well. I’ve read some good reviews on these applications, but I can’t really recommend any because I’ve only used Adobe’s Reader. However, if you are interested in other options, a quick Google search will yield plenty of results. Wikipedia even has a complete list of free Readers and categorizes them according to operating systems.

Just keep in mind, you might be able to find a tool that takes up less space on your hard drive, or something a little faster, but that’s probably because it doesn’t have all the bells and whistles that come packaged with Acrobat Reader. For example, Foxit Reader's download size is 2.55 MB, which is less than half the size of Acrobat's, and Foxit promises to launch instantly, without any delay. That probably sounds appealing to most users, just be sure you aren't leaving any needed, and free, functionality on the table.

If you are interested in Acrobat Reader, you can download the latest version (currently 8.1.2) from the Adobe’s website at no charge.