Category: Acrobat

My favorite apps for taking notes and sense-making from PDF and Kindle

Most of what I read for work these days is in PDF or Kindle format, and there’s an awful lot of it. Trying to make sense out of the ever-faster firehose of information, most of it on subjects that are new to me, has forced me to rethink my research methods, or lack of them. I’ve never been able to take great notes by hand – I’m a much faster typist than hand-writer, and depend on being able to search within my notes, so I’ve mainly concentrated on electronic workflows. 

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Acrobat was unable to make this document accessible… error

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The other day I received a PDF file that need to be converted back to Word or text format. But every attempt to save it from Acrobat Pro to Word resulted in the error shown above:

“Acrobat was unable to make this document accessible because of the following error:

Could not save page structure. [12]

Please not that some pages of this document may have been changed. Because of this failure, you are advised to not save these changes.”

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Enable commenting in Adobe Reader, then use a PDF as a whiteboard

Writing notes and sketching on PDF’s using a Tablet PC can be an excellent replacement for a blackboard or whiteboard in the classroom, meetings or lectures. Easier than using Powerpoint, especially when you want to improvise, it is particularly useful for annotating complex diagrams, music, mathematical problems, or anything requiring gridlines or graph paper.

On a Lenovo Tablet PC, you can use the clipping function to drop PDF’s into the Journal application and type or write on them with the pen. The pen has good enough resolution to write legibly, and draw lines and curves.

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Installing Adobe Reader on Vista

The case of the missing confirmation dialog
A problem I’ve encountered several times on Vista: dialogs will open, then refuse to disappear, and the Windows Task Manager simply tells you they are “expecting a response”. They are “expecting a response” from a confirmation dialog that has completely disappeared.

This seems to happen when another window pops up and steals focus unexpectedly. The confirmation dialog is not hidden behind any other windows, nor minimized, but simply vanished. This can be very confusing even when you know what you are looking for. This happened while I was installing Adobe Reader. Here’s what it looked like when it got stuck:

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