The Acrobat Interface

The Acrobat interface is divided into six separate areas: the toolbar well, document pane, navigation pane, comments pane, How To pane, and status bar. The toolbar well is always visible, and the document pane and status bar are visible whenever a document is open . The navigation pane, comments pane, and How To pane might not be visible at all times, but they are always available.

The Acrobat interface.

Tools and Toolbars

Acrobat has 15 toolbars, although only 6 of those are displayed for most documents. You can access all the toolbars through the View menu and Toolbars submenu. Selecting a toolbar in the Toolbars submenu displays it if it is not visible, or hides it if it is visible.

KEY TERM

Toolbar well The area just under the menu bar where the Acrobat toolbars normally reside. You can drag toolbars out of the toolbar well to make them free-floating or drag them back to dock them with the other toolbars.

Toolbars are normally docked in the toolbar well just under the menu bar, but they can be moved to suit your needs. To move a toolbar, click the left edge of the toolbar and drag it to a new location. Once moved, you can dock a floating toolbar by dragging it back to the toolbar well.

Some tools are hidden beneath other tools. If additional tools are available beneath a tool, a small down arrow appears to the right of the tool, similar to the down arrow displayed to the right of most drop-down lists. For example, hidden beneath the Zoom In tool are the Zoom Out, Dynamic Zoom , and Loupe tools. To access a hidden tool, click the black arrow and select a new tool from those listed.

The Document Pane

The document pane is the main window in Acrobat. It displays your document, as well as a status bar at the bottom of the screen. The tools that let you control how your document is displayed are on the Zoom toolbar.

The Zoom toolbar.

The Zoom toolbar contains the Zoom tool, which can be used to zoom in or out of your document. To select this tool, click it in the toolbar and then click in your document to zoom in, or Alt -click (Windows) or Option -click (Mac OS) to zoom out. You can also click and drag in your document to zoom in to a specific location.

The Zoom toolbar also contains standard magnification controls that let you zoom in or out or enter a specific magnification percentage.

The three buttons on the Zoom toolbar you might not be familiar with are Actual Size , Fit Page , and Fit Width :

• Actual Size Displays the page at 100% viewing size.

• Fit Page Fits the entire page in the available document window space. This is good if you want to see what the page looks like but don't necessarily need to read the text on the page.

• Fit Width Displays the document so you can see the entire width of the page; however, you need to scroll up and down to see the entire document. This is ideal if you want to be able to read the text on the page.

Acrobat's status bar, displayed at the bottom of the screen whenever you have a document open, doesn't present you with information like most status bars do. Instead, it provides additional controls for viewing your document.

Two buttons appear at the far left side of the status bar. The first button lets you view your document in full-screen (presentation) mode, and the second button hides your toolbars to provide more room for viewing your document. When the toolbars are hidden, a pop-up menu of basic tools and simple magnification controls are added to the status bar.

In the middle of the status bar are navigation controls that display the current page and contain buttons that take you to the first, previous, next, and last pages of the document, plus controls to go to the previous and next views. These controls are discussed in more detail in the Viewing PDFs section later in this chapter.

On the right side of the status bar are four layout buttons. These display your document in Single Page view, Continuous view, Continuous Facing view, and Facing view.

The document layout buttons.

The layout buttons do the following:

• Single Page Displays the document one page at a time. When scrolling through the document, the current page is replaced by the next page.

• Continuous Lets you smoothly scroll from the bottom of one page to the top of the next page, much like in a word processing application.

• Continuous Facing Lets you smoothly scroll through your document but displays two pages at a time, as if you were looking at an open book.

• Facing Displays two pages at a time but replaces the current two pages with the next two as you scroll through the document.

The Navigation Pane

Clicking the Bookmarks, Signatures , or Pages tab opens the navigation pane along the left side of the document pane. This pane displays the information about the bookmarks, digital signatures, or pages contained in the document.

NOTE

Virtually all software applications refer to the interface elements you click to choose various sets of options within a dialog box as tabs . Adobe uses this term for the elements along the left side of the screen, which makes perfect sense. However, Adobe also refers to the information that appears after you click a tab as a tab . To avoid confusion, we use the term panel to refer to the information that is displayed. Instead of clicking a tab to open or close a tab, in this book we'll say something like "Click the Bookmarks tab to open or close the Bookmark panel."

The Bookmarks, Signatures , and Pages panels do the following:

• Bookmarks Displays all prepared bookmarks for navigating within the document. See [42] Create a Bookmark for more information on using bookmarks.

• Signatures Is empty if the document has not been digitally signed. If it has been signed, this panel displays information about the signatures and whether any changes have been made to the document since it was signed.

• Pages Provides a quick way to navigate within the document by displaying thumbnails of each page. You can double-click the thumbnail of a particular page to go directly to that page in the document pane.

The Comments Pane

Clicking the Comments or Attachments tab opens the comments pane along the bottom of the document pane. This pane displays the contents of either the Comments or Attachments panel:

The Comments and Attachments panels are used for the following:

• Comments Lists all the comments that have been added to the document, along with a toolbar for managing those comments. See 13 About the Review Process and 24 About the Comments Pane for more information about comments.

• Attachments Lists all the files that have been attached to the PDF file. A toolbar appears at the top of the Attachments panel with tools for opening, saving, adding, deleting, and searching attachments.

The How To Pane

The How To pane offers easy access to step-by-step instructions for common Acrobat tasks . By default, this pane opens when Acrobat launches, but many users turn off this behavior (by deselecting the Show How To Window at Startup check box) so they have more screen real estate available for their documents.

Using the How To pane is like using the easiest website imaginable. At the top of the pane are Home, Previous , and Next buttons, as well as a button to hide the pane altogether. The rest of the pane consists of a list of topics, each of which is a clickable link that displays related tasks. Each of these tasks is a clickable link that displays a page of instructions on how to perform that task, as well as hyperlinks for related topics.

The How To pane displays simple help text.