Section 98. Setting Up an Email-based PDF Review in Acrobat

#98. Setting Up an Email-based PDF Review in Acrobat

If you and your clients tend to work better by communicating by email or you are unable to or prefer not to host your PDF review online (see #96), consider initiating an email-based PDF review instead. Acrobat 7 Professional makes it easy to conduct a PDF review via email. Email-based reviews have advantages over just attaching a PDF to an email message, such as being able to include Adobe Reader users in the review process and the ability to automatically merge all the reviewer's comments into a single document (see #100).

Sizing for Email Delivery

If your review PDF is over 5 MB, you'll be asked if it's okay to proceed with the review setup. Many mail systems do not allow email attachments over 5 MB (although some allow as much as 20 MB). If you're concerned that your PDF won't get through, click No and exit the review setup. Try using the PDF Optimizer (Advanced > PDF Optimizer) to reduce your PDF to an email-friendly file size.

Follow these steps to set up an email-based review in Acrobat:

1.	Open your PDF file in Acrobat and choose Comments > Send for Review > Send by Email for Review. If you haven't supplied Acrobat with your email address, you'll be prompted to enter it in the Identity Setup dialog. Enter your email address along with any other information you want to include and click Complete.
2.	In Step 1 of the Send by Email for Review dialog, your open PDF should be specified in the menu. From here you can choose a different PDF for review. If everything looks good, click Next.
3.	In Step 2 of the review setup, choose the people you'd like to invite to participate in the review (Figure 98a). You can either enter email addresses directly in the box or select them from your saved addresses by clicking the Address Book button. Click Next to proceed to the last step. Figure 98a. Click the Address Book button to select people from your address book to invite or just type their email addresses directly into the box.
4.	In Step 3, preview the email subject and message that will be sent to the reviewers you invited (Figure 98b). If you want to make any additions or changes to the invitation, you can do so by typing over the default text. But keep in mind that the message includes instructions for your recipients on how to participate in the review. When you're ready to send the invitation, click Send Invitation. Acrobat then creates the email invitation with your PDF file attached and sends it out for review. Figure 98b. In this final step, you can preview and make any edits to the subject and message of the email invitation that will be sent to the people you've invited.

Customizing Your Review Options

Click the Customize Review Options button in the second step of the review setup if you'd like to enable the drawing markup tools for review. You can also request that reviewers return their comments to other email addresses as well or an address other than your own. Also by default, users of the free Adobe Reader 7 will be able to participate in the review. This option unlocks the commenting features in Adobe Reader but adds some limits to the commenting features in Acrobat. Deselect this option if you want to limit the review to only users of Acrobat.