- A New Design Philosophy
- Thing I Like #1: Fewer Menus
- Thing I Like #2: Fewer Toolbars
- Thing I Like #3: The Action Panes
- Thing I Like #4: Easily Customized Toolbars
- Thing I Like #5: Individual Text Edit Tools
- Conclusion: Yep, Its Better
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Like this article? We recommend
Thing I Like #4: Easily Customized Toolbars
The Acrobat 9 toolbars were customizable, of course, but the process was roundabout and not particularly easy to discover. Selecting View > Toolbars > More Tools would yield a dialog box that listed all of Acrobat 9’s tools and toolbars (Figure 8). Selecting or clearing the individual checkboxes added that tool to (or removed it from) the corresponding toolbar.
)
Figure 8 Customizing the Acrobat 9 toolbars entailed the use of this moderately complex dialog box. Not very difficult, but it was sometimes surprisingly hard to find the one feature you were looking for.
In Acrobat X, any tool in the Actions Panes can be added to the Quick Tools toolbar by right-clicking the tool in the pane (Figure 9). Removing the tool from the toolbar is done, again, by right-clicking the tool (Figure 9, again). Intuitive and easy, I think.
){kind=small}
Figure 9 Selecting features for the Acrobat X toolbars could hardly be easier. Right-click the feature in the Actions pane to add it; right-click the tool in the toolbar to remove it.
There is a subtle benefit to this ease of customization. In Acrobat 9, adjusting the toolbars’ contents was something I did only rarely; I set up my toolbars and then left them alone. With Acrobat X, I’m much more inclined to make temporary additions to the toolbars. If today I happen to be repeatedly using a normally-unused feature, I’ll add it to the toolbar just for the current session and then remove it again when I’m finished. The toolbars are much less “fixed” in my mind.