Adobe Acrobat 7 TIPS and TRICKS THE 100150 BEST [Electronic resources]

TIP 7: What Do You Prefer?

You can define a number of preferences that help you get to work faster. Some preferences get you into the program faster; others show you what you are working with more quickly.

Choose Edit > Preferences (Acrobat > Preferences) to open the Preferences dialog. You see a long list of options in the left pane of the dialog; clicking an option displays a range of settings in the right pane of the dialog. Click Startup in the list at the left of the Preferences dialog to display the Startup options in the right pane of the dialog (Figure 7a). The Opening Documents preferences are listed at the top of the window.

• If you work with more than five documents on a regular basis, change the value shown in the Maximum documents in most-recently used list from its default of 5. When you click the File menu heading, you see the list at the bottom of the menu and can quickly select the document you want to open.

• See the control Reopen Documents to Last Viewed Page. The default setting is Digital Editions, which means that only digital media (formerly known as eBooks) reopens at the page last displayed in the document. Click the pull-down arrow and choose the Marked Files and Digital Editions Only option when working with a number of documents containing comments; select All Files when you are working in long sessions with multiple files. As you open closed documents, you are automatically shown the last location you viewed in the open document.

  Tip

  The display feature works only during a single session; if you close and then reopen Acrobat 7, and then the document, it displays according to its document settings, usually showing the top of the first page.

• Click Use page cache (it is deselected by default). The page cache is a buffer area. If you cache the pages, as you display one page the next page in a document is read and placed in a buffer area until you are ready to view it. Pages load faster, and the faster load time is particularly noticeable if you are working with image-intensive or interactive documents.

Click Page Display in the options listed in the left pane of the Preferences dialog. You can set some page preferences to get up to working speed faster:

• Deselect the Display large images option (Figure 7b) if your computer has a slow redraw speed. On older computers, images take a lot of time to draw on the screen. Each time you move the image means more time waiting for the image to redraw again.

  Figure 7b. Changing some Page Display settings can change how quickly your documents are displayed.

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• Deselect the smoothing preferencestext, line art, and imagesstext, if your computer is particularly slow. Deselecting the smoothing may save some time in displaying your documents, although you sacrifice some of the clarity and crispness of the content for display speed.

• Click the Use greek text below xx pixels option to make the text on a page smaller than the value specified (the default value is 8 pixels) appear as gray lines (Figure 7c). Selecting this option speeds up redraw time as well.

  Figure 7c. Substitute gray lines for very small text to display pages more quickly.

• Click General in the Preferences dialog's left pane to show the General preferences (Figure 7d). Look for these settings in the miscellaneous section of the dialog's pane.

  Set Your Autosave Click the automatically save document changes to temporary file field to set the autosave time. By default, Acrobat saves document changes every five minutes. If you are working on a very large document, the autosave can take some time away from your work; you may want to increase the duration between autosaves.

  Figure 8d. Change how often Acrobat saves your document, and how you access open documents using General preferences.

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• Click Show documents in taskbar to display a button for each open document on the Windows taskbar. This way you don't have to open Acrobat's Window menu to select an open document.

When you have completed setting and changing preferences, click OK to close the Preferences dialog and apply your settings.