Acrobat processing: OS X

For additional information other than these “required” steps, see Acrobat usage tips.

Embed thumbnails

For scanned PDFs, it can take Acrobat Reader quite a while to generate the little navigation thumbnails. Those can be precalculated and stored in the PDF file. They add negligibly to the file size.

Numbering pages

It is possible to make the internal PDF page numbers match the numbers printed on the pages. For complex documents, it is even possible to have an initial section numbered with lower-case Roman numbers, followed by main text with Arabic numerals, then plates numbered as Plate 1, Plate 2,etc. (for example).

You'll see the numbers under the navigation thumbnails change to your settings. If you'd like to number other sections of the paper in different ways, select those pages and repeat the numbering routine above.

PDF “Optimizing”

The PDF “Optimization” procedure applies whenever a PDF file is saved out of Acrobat. The following settings have been chosen with these assumptions:

Note that these settings are saved on a per-user basis, so you need to check them at least once at the beginning of any Acrobat PDF-processing session.

Note: These settings are appropriate for Acrobat 6.0 on Mac OS X. We also have analogous setting information for Acrobat 7.0 for Windows.