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Step by Step guide: Compiling a polished PDF document, Part 2

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18th Oct 2006
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Introduction
In the first part of this series we used Acrobat Professional to combine a Word document, an Excel spreadsheet and some existing PDF files into a single PDF document.

In this second part we will look at adding further documents to an existing combined PDF, including information from web pages. We will also look at some of Acrobat’s editing features that may be particularly useful for working with combined files. Then we will add headers and footers – including page numbers - and a background. Finally we will improve the usability of our document by using bookmarks to add navigation facilities.

Adding files
Since the result of combining files is a single PDF file, that file too can become part of a combined file, so you could add other documents to the beginning or end using the same techniques we used to create the file in part 1. However, we might also want to add pages to the middle of our combined document, or to remove some of the existing pages. Here we have opened our example combined PDF ‘Visit Scotland full report.pdf’ in the same way we would open any PDF file. We have also clicked the Pages tab in the navigation pane at the left-hand edge of the screen. This displays the individual pages that make up our combined document:

We can now choose to insert or delete pages, or to extract one or more pages as individual PDF documents. The page operations can be accessed by clicking on an existing page thumbnail with the right mouse button or clicking the Document option on the main menu bar. Here we have right-clicked on the page 3 thumbnail:

As you can see, the right-click menu includes our page options. We will use Insert Pages to insert another Word document into the middle of our PDF. When we click on Insert Pages we are taken to a normal file selection screen where we can insert a PDF directly or choose from the usual range of file types that Acrobat can convert. We will set the Files of type: option to Microsoft Office in order to display the Word files in the folder we choose. We can then select the file we wish to convert and insert:

The Insert Pages dialog lets us set the Location: to Before or After and we can then chose which page to insert the new pages before or after, or choose the First or Last page. Because we accessed the screen by right-clicking on the page 3 thumbnail, the Page option defaults to page 3. When we click on OK, Acrobat will convert our Word document to PDF format and insert it in the chosen location.

Add a web page
As we have seen, we can add any PDF file directly, or use Acrobat to convert and insert a range of other file types. We can also add web pages. Acrobat is capable of creating a PDF file from a single web page, or some or all of an entire web site. If you wish to create such a PDF in isolation you could choose the File-Create PDF-From Web Page option, or the corresponding toolbar button or keyboard shortcut. However, we want to add our web page to our current combined file. To do this we use the option Advanced-Web Capture-Append Web Page:

As you can see, we have pasted in the URL of the Adobe UK site as an example. Under Settings we can choose how much of the web site to download and convert. We only want the page itself and therefore don’t need to change the Levels option.

Choosing additional levels would download and convert pages that our page links to, and also pages those pages link to and so on. Choosing more than one level, or Get entire site, can result in very large, time consuming downloads and the use of lots of disk space. You will also notice a Settings button that provides access to more options to control the structure and layout of the converted file. We will just keep it simple and click the Create button to add the page to the end of our file. Acrobat downloads the web page, converts it to PDF and appends it to the end of our file.

If we wanted the web page elsewhere in our combined document, we can just select the relevant page thumbnail or thumbnails, and drag them to the required position. We can use the normal Windows keyboard/mouse combinations of Control-Click to select multiple pages individually, and Shift-Click to select a block of pages.

Add Headers & Footers
Having included all the pages we need in our PDF file, and arranged them in the required order, we can now set about adding further features to our combined document. As our document has been created from several different files, it is unlikely that any page numbering will bear much resemblance to the page position within our current PDF document. We can use Acrobat to add its own page numbers and other information, and we have extensive control over the information included, the format and the position. Choose Document-Add Headers & Footers:

Here we have chosen the Header tab and clicked in the left hand box to insert a date in our chosen style, and then clicked in the centre box to insert the page number. We could also have typed in any text that we wanted to include. The Page Options settings allow us to control which pages we want to include page numbers on, and where to start them from. We can also choose different headers and footers for Odd and Even pages using the Alternation: option, and set the position of the margins. We can preview the result before clicking the OK button to add the headers and footers to our document.

Add Watermark & Background
Watermarks and backgrounds are similar. Backgrounds appear behind the page, whereas a watermark appears on top of the page:

We can type in text or use a picture from a file. In this case we have added the word ‘Draft’ at a point size of 72, set it to an angle of 45 degrees and ‘faded’ it a bit by setting the opacity to 50%.

Add Bookmark
If we click on the Bookmark tab in the navigation pane on the left-hand side of the screen we can see that Acrobat has created bookmarks for each of the individual files from which we originally created our combined document. Also, additional bookmarks have been created from paragraphs of our Word document that were formatted with the heading style. We can click on any of the bookmarks to take us to the page, or part of the page to which the bookmark relates.

We can improve the usability of our document by adding bookmarks that will enable our reader to go directly to particular places, and by deleting unwanted bookmarks or renaming existing bookmarks. To add a new bookmark, just select the text or graphic that you want to link the bookmark to, and then select Edit-Add Bookmark:

By default the name of the bookmark will be the text to which it points or ‘untitled’ if it points to a non-text object. Just right-click on the bookmark to rename it, or to delete it or change where it points to. You can also drag bookmarks to a different position in the bookmark pane.

Conclusion
So, far from being simply a tool to convert a single document into a different format, Acrobat Professional allows the creation of a combined document from multiple sources. In addition, headers, footers, backgrounds and watermarks can be added to all or part of that document. Finally, to make the document as easy to access as possible, bookmarks can be used to tailor-make a navigation system.

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