There will be times when you have a document that you need to scan for your class or for your personal use. Once you have done this, you realize that there is a lot of unnecessary empty space on the document and you decide to crop it. Now, when you go to print it, you see wasted portions of a piece of paper.

The process of cropping a page in Acrobat Pro is a simple one. When you crop a page in Acrobat, it is similar to taking a pair of scissors and cutting off portions of the document. The effect is that you are left with a reduced size document. Instead of your document being a printable 8.5" X 11", it is now an awkward 6.48" X 7.15." Not only do you have an odd border to your printed page, but you are also wasting space. By resizing your pdf file in photoshop you will be resizing your document to a printable 8.5" X 11", and increasing the size of the document's contents.

First, open the document you intend to resize in Adobe Photoshop. You can do this by right clicking on the icon of your document, selecting Open With and selecting Adobe Photoshop.*

Once Photoshop has opened your file, you will be met with a smaller window that was thumbnails of each page within your document (in this example-15). At the top of this window select Pages to view your document as pages.

Now you must highlight every thumbnail. To do this you can press the Command (if you are working on a Mac platform) or the Control (if you are working on a Windows platform) on your keyboard and click on each thumbnail until all of them are selected.

After doing this, you will have to deselect the option that says Constrain Proportions and then type in the desired image size (in this example 8.5" X 11" [the average page size]) that you would like. You can locate this by referring yourself to the red and blue arrows in the image below, respectively. Select Ok at the bottom right hand corner of that window.

Photoshop will now be opening each individual page of your PDF document in a separate Photoshop window. At this point you have successfully resized your document pages to your desired size. However, you now need to reformat them into a single PDF file. To do this simply click File, Automate, & PDF Presentation.

A new window will open. Select the option to Add Open Files & Multi-Page Document. At this point make sure that the numbers at the end of the names are in order. If they are not, simply drag and drop the first page to the top of the list, and continue until they are in numeric order. Click Save. You can view this process in the following image by looking at the Red arrow and the Blue Arrow, respectively.

A new window will open asking you to name and indicate where you want this file to be saved. Choose your location and click save. After this a new window will open. If you would like to view the final resized document select the option to View PDF After Saving. You do not need to do anything else now but click Save PDF.

Congratulations! You have now resized your PDF document into an appropriate dimension for printing. Remember you can save anything to a PDF format, and therefore resize almost anything to a printable size. For further information on saving your document in PDF format, please refer to my previous blog entry - PDF Files or Dobromir's - Save anything in PDF!

If you have any questions about this, or any other STA Blog Post, please feel free to contact us or leave a comment.

*note: If you do not have Adobe Photoshop installed on your computer, you can use this program in the Faculty Instructional Technology Center (FITC) in the library.

There will be times when you are working on a specific document in a specific program. You could be working on a flyer or advertisement on Microsoft Office's Publisher and you want to share your work with a peer, a student, or a colleague. Unfortunately, they do not have Publisher installed on their computer. This means that they cannot access or even view your product. How frustrating.

Fortunately, there is a simple solution to this problem. On the newer versions of all Microsoft Office Programs there is a PDF converter. This allows you to convert all of your files into a readily accessible PDF (Portable Document Format) file. This will allow whomever you are sending your file to, to review your product, and add comments to it. This is also convenient when you want your receiver to view your file, but not alter its contents in any way.

To convert your file into a PDF is a very simple process. First you should save your file as its regular format (.doc, .pub., etc.). Once you have done this click File, and then Save As.

After having done this, a new screen will appear prompting you to name your file and designate the saving location. Name the file whatever you want, but before you press save, be sure to change the following. Under Save as type scroll through the options until you come across the option PDF. Select this type of format. Press Save and you have just created a new PDF file of your product!

You can now send this file without the fear of it being changed, and without the fear of your recipient not being able to view the file.

Note: For your recipient to view your PDF file, they will have to have, at minimum, Adober Reader installed on their computer. This is a free program that can be downloaded at Adobe's website here.

If you have any questions about this, or any other STA Blog Post, please feel free to contact us or leave a comment.

The very first time one opens Macromedia Dreamweaver, he is greeted with an array of different options - HTML, CSS, XHTML and Javascript to name just a few. Trying to make sense of all these different (but apparently important) elements of web design can be a bit daunting at first. For someone trying to simply learn the ropes of basic web design, the thought of all these languages and scripts might be overwhelming but this blog post will try and reveal the 'method' behind this apparent 'madness.'



At the very basic level a web site is a collection of text, images, sounds and videos. Advanced web sites then include features like interactive videos, username/password logins and links to other videos. Evidently the more advanced the website the more features and formats it needs to be able to integrate seamless and efficiently. This is where the different languages and scripts come to play.

A very basic website with only a few images and text can be handled sufficiently with HTML. However, start adding videos (that use flash or silverlight), interactive menus, secure encryption channels for password logins and then the complexity increases exponentially. This is why it clearly makes more sense to have separate mediums to edit and create separate aspects of web design, aspects I will try and clarify.

MARKUP LANGUAGES: (HTML, XHTML, XML)
The key function of a markup language is to enable the designer to annotate text which is syntactically distinguishable from that text. This is why HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) uses '<>' and '<>/' to distinguish the content from the annotations. These annotations (which lie within the '<>') indicate information regarding a particular text. Examples of markup languages are HTML (the standard) and newer languages like XHTML and XML.


STYLE SHEET LANGUAGES: (CSS, XSL)
Markup languages help annotate text, style sheet languages help edit and manage the layout of structured documents (this includes text and other 'marked up' content as well). Style sheet languages essentially describe how the content is to be displayed on your browser. However, the function of style sheet languages is much more than just basic visual presentation of content. They allow the designer to process the content and provide a suitable output when options like the font size, font type, colors as well as orders of appearance are changed. A good designer is able to create logical structures that help clearly and easily edit the positioning and design of his content. The primary language used is Cascading Style Sheets (CSS).



SERVER SIDE SCRIPTING: (PHP, ASP)
Okay, you now have a great looking site with text all beautifully organized, images in the right locations and the overall layout is just perfect. But, wait a minute, isn't the website no better than a wallpaper? Think about it, you can't interact with it and you can't explore anything. This is where server side scripting comes into play. Suppose you go to the Apple home page. Now you click on the tab that leads you to the iPod section. After an instant the page with information on iPods loads up. Server side scripting just kicked into action the moment you clicked the iPod tab. Essentially programs, these scripts are made to identify when a user performs a specific action or request (like opening the iPod page) and accordingly loads up the correct page. Scripts understandably include much more complicated functions but for all practical purposes their essential function is to detect certain user requests and actions, transfer the necessary data from the data server to the user's computer and display them as a web page.



CLIENT SIDE SCRIPTING: (Javascript, VBscript)
Anyone who is even the least bit savvy about computers must have heard about Javascript or Java in short. Java is a scripting program that dictates how the webpage interacts to the user. For example you go onto the Sony website (www.sony.com). When you take the mouse button over the PLAYSTATION tab the tab expands to 'reveal' sub options like the PS3/PS2/PSP. I use the word reveal because the content is already present in the web page. Scrolling the mouse button over the particular tab activated the 'hidden' content to be revealed. Client side scriptin allows web designers to pack in a lot more extra content that is revealed according to the actions of the user. Client side scripting is primarily conducted by the browser (since it involves analysing and displaying ouput already present in the webpage). But server side scripting and client side scripting sound similar right?
 
Take this example:
Stay on the sony website. Scroll over the PLAYSTATION tab, almost instantly an attached sub group appears with further options (PS3/PS2/PSP). Now scroll over and press the PS3 sub-tab, again almost instantaneously another sub group (systems/accessories/features) appears. Now click on the systems sub-tab, this will lead to the page reloading (which takes considerably longer time) as it opens the requested page. Can you guess which parts involved client side scripting and which part involved server side scripting?
Client side scripting essentially enable web sites to have different and changing content depending on user input or other variables. They are faster as well as more efficient than server side scripting for the same purpose. Imagine a web page reloading every time you scroll over a tab just so that the page can be displayed with that particular tab highlighted.