- 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
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Thing I Like #5: Individual Text Edit Tools
You wouldn’t know it from this article, perhaps, but I make my living at least partially by writing. That being so, I spend a lot of my time marking PDF text for deletion, replacement, or comment. In Acrobat 9, this process was a multi-step process, to wit:
- Select the Text Edits tool in the Comments toolbar (Figure 10).
- Using the resulting I-beam cursor, select the text you want to mark.
- In the Text Edits tool’s drop-down menu, select the type of markup you want to apply to the text (again, Figure 10).
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Figure 10 To add a text markup in Acrobat 9, you had to Select the Text Edits tool, then select the text you wanted to mark up, then specify the type of markup from the Text Edits menu.
The internal dialog you conduct with yourself when doing this is: “I need to mark up some text. The text is here. What I need to do is replace it.” This is not the way your mind normally thinks of marking up text, and the Acrobat 9 mark-up process always felt clumsy because of this.
Acrobat X did away with the Text Edits tool and its menu. There is now one tool for each type of markup the program supports. Because I mark up text all the time, I placed these tools in the Quick Tools toolbar (Figure 11). Now, to make a comment on some text, I just:
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Figure 11 Acrobat X provides a separate tool for each possible text markup.
- Select the appropriate tool in the toolbar.
- Select the text that is the target for the markup.
Done.
This conforms much better to the way we think of the markup process: “I need to replace this text here.” Much smoother and more natural feeling.
Better, No?