Building a Slideshow Presentation with Picture Tasks
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
This chapter is from the book
Suppose you need to present a series of photographs to a committee that will decide which one belongs in a company brochure. Or imagine that you are preparing a collection of shots, one of which will appear in a newspaper ad. How can you present the selection of possibilities to a client in a way that is both professional and interesting?
Acrobat 7 includes a plug-in called Picture Tasks that allows you to easily manage a group of images and prepare different types of output, including a slideshow and various print options. In this chapter's project, you'll learn how to use the plug-in to create a slideshow and customize it, as well as to send the final product automatically by e-mail from within Acrobat. Your viewers will be able to see the slideshow using Acrobat or Adobe Reader—a slideshow is viewable in Acrobat version 5 or newer and Acrobat Reader version 5, as well as in Adobe Reader, which replaced Acrobat Reader in version 6 of the program. Bonus material on the book's Web site shows you how to print pictures with various layouts.
Picture This
Let's look at Susan Jenkins's predicament. Susan is a busy assistant at Picture This, a small suburban advertising and marketing agency that specializes in customizing calendars, placemats, and other marketing items for local businesses.
Susan has mastered the art of transferring images from her camera to her computer. Working with a simple image manipulation program she received with her camera, she can organize, correct, and store hundreds of images at a time. Susan is responsible for showing her images to the company's client, and therein lies her problem. She has been in the habit of attaching images to e-mails to send to her clients, but she doesn't like searching for, attaching, and keeping track of the images. She doesn't find this method particularly convenient—either for herself or her e-mail recipients, who are forced to open, save, and organize these images themselves. More importantly, Susan would like to present these images to her clients in a more professional and interesting format.
What Susan needs is a quick way of assembling a collection of images in a format useful for online distribution via e-mail. She might decide to jazz up the way the images are presented, perhaps even adding date captions and music before sending the file to her client, Carter Motors ( Figure 3.1 ).
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Figure 3.1 The project's slideshow contains a number of winter images.
Acrobat 7, of course, can help Susan solve her problem. In fact, there are two ways you can use Acrobat to produce a slideshow, depending on the format of the images you intend to use. One method is to create a slideshow manually, which you can do if you don't have JPEG files to work with (see the sidebar, "Working With Other Image Formats"). This method involves adding your own transitions, using various tools to add captions (and music if you like), and setting the document to correctly display the slideshow. See Chapter 2 for more details on displaying a presentation.
The simplest method, which is covered in this chapter, is to use Picture Tasks, a plug-in that is activated when you use JPEG images in Acrobat.