I was fortunate to participate in the National Education Computing Conference (NECC) at the end of June. As to be expected, the sessions I attended were a mixed bag—some useful and informative, others not so much. The most practical session I attended was a 3-hour lab on Delivering Curriculum and Building Portfolios with Acrobat PDFs. I’m looking forward to more experimentation with Acrobat Portfolios! In the meantime, here’s a quick tip that I learned…
Acrobat Professional comes with Optical Character Recognition (OCR) built in! Amazing… and why didn’t I know that before?!
Here’s how it works:
- open a pdf document
- from the Document menu, select OCR text recognition > recognize text using OCR
- choose the page range you want to read and click OK
You get a series of slider bars that indicate activity, and then…nothing. At least, nothing apparent.
- go to File > Export > Word Document
- save the file
Voila! When you open the file using MS Word, you’ll see the OCR results. In the simple test I did, it seemed to work pretty well. Note that you can also export from pdf to a word document without doing optical character recognition, but you only get an image of the page rather than editable text.
I have to admit I haven’t yet spent much time looking into the new features of Adobe CS4 products—that’s on my things-to-do list for next month, when I’m planning to attend Adobe Max 2008. As a preview, however, I’m particularly intrigued by the new features that allow InDesign to export working swf files as well as xfl files (ready to import natively into the Flash authoring environment). This clip from Adobe TV gives a demo. It’s about 30 minutes long, and you have to persevere through a bit of cheesiness at the beginning. (The part where he speaks to plush stuffed toys only lasts for seconds…resist the urge to turn it off there! Seriously.) It’s really a fascinating idea, and I’m looking forward to exploring it further.
Adobe made news last week by releasing a beta version of a web-based photo editor, Photoshop Express. They also created a significant stir with over zealous terms of use—implying that Adobe can use your images in any way they please. According to multiple sources, Adobe heard the outcry; they’re currently working with their legal department to rewrite the terms document. Photoshop Express follows other online photo editing tools like Picnik, and photo storage sites like Flickr. They trumped Picasa by offering more storage space (2 GB of free storage), but neglected to add the capacity to organize with tags. I haven’t yet found any compelling reason to create a Photoshop Express account, other than pure curiosity.
While I was looking at Photoshop Express and reading assorted reviews, I came across this article on ReadWriteWeb about Adobe’s growing set of online tools, like:
Adobe Labs has been busy! I had no idea. As with Photoshop Express, none of these tools appear to be the first on the block. They do have a certain elegance in design, but I’m not sure that elegance and the Adobe name are enough to attract throngs of users. As ReadWriteWeb speculated, combining all these tools into a one-stop suite might, however, give them a significant edge over single-tool competitors. Several of these tools have potential for educators…something to keep an eye on.