Note: the following settings address only saving files in Acrobat under Windows. For other tips that are relevant, 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.
- Click Pages in the far-left Navigation Tabs to show the page thumbnails
- Right-click anywhere in the thumbnail navigation pane
- Select Embed All Page Thumbnails
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).
- Click Pages in the far-left Navigation Tabs to show the page thumbnails
- If you want to number only a subset of the pages, select those pages by clicking on the first page thumbnail of the range, then Shift-clicking on the last thumbnail of the range
- Right-click on one of the pages you selected
- Select Number Pages...
- Make sure the correct pages are listed under Pages (either All, Selected, or the appropriate From: range)
- Pick the desired numbering Style:
- If you want a prefix before the numbers (e.g. “Plate ”) type it into the Prefix: blank
- Make sure the Start: page number is what you want
- Click OK
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:
- Lossless compression is preferred so that images are retained completely intact
- What is being saved is usually a scanned document (possibly with an invisible OCR layer beneath the page images).
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.
These settings are appropriate for Acrobat 7.0 on Windows. We also have analogous setting information for Acrobat 6.0 for Mac OS X.
- Go to Edit -> Preferences -> Convert to PDF
- For each of the following entries: BMP PCX PNG TIFF do the following:
- Edit settings and set within Compression:
- Monochrome: CCITT G4
- Grayscale: ZIP
- Color: ZIP
- Save the file using:
- File -> Reduce File Size... and then:
- Make compatible with: Acrobat 5.0 and later