Features

For example, if you used the Save as PDF feature to export 30 company invoices from your accounting software for emailing to customers, you would have to open each PDF in Acrobat to add a security password. The same goes for publishing product brochures on a Web site, issuing electronic legal documents, and so on.

One solution is to create all your PDFs via Acrobat Distiller, but this involves changing its security settings for each job and remembering to remove them afterwards. For Acrobat 5.05 users, it also implies an untidy two-step manual process via Classic mode. Thankfully, both Acrobat 5.05 and now 6.0 provide an easy-to-use feature for building batch sequences that can automate repetitive tasks such as this.For simplicity, this tutorial uses Acrobat 5.05, but you can follow the steps in the brand-new Acrobat 6 Standard or Professional editions with a couple of differences. In Acrobat 6, the Batch Processing submenu has been changed to a single command in its own right, now found under the Advanced menu, not the File menu. This then opens the Batch Sequences dialog, which looks and works almost exactly like the one in Acrobat 5.

As with all other custom settings in Acrobat, batch sequences are recorded as individual files on your hard disk. This means you can back them up and share them with colleagues very easily. The eight ready-made demo sequences can be found in the Sequences folder inside your Adobe Acrobat 5 folder.

In Acrobat 6,

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you'll need to control-click on the Acrobat program icon, select Show Package Contents from the contextual menu, then navigate to /Contents/MacOS/Sequences. By default, any additional custom sequences you create are saved inside a different Sequences folder. With version 5 of the software, you'll find them in ~/Documents/Acrobat User Data/Sequences within your Home folder. With Acrobat 6, you'll find them in ~/Library/Acrobat User Data/Sequences in your Home folder again.

You can add, remove and move sequence files around on your hard disk, but you must relaunch Acrobat in order to update the Batch Processing submenu accordingly under the File menu. Most sequence files you've created with Acrobat 5 should work in Acrobat 6, but you must move them to the correct folder first.

There are a couple of features of the 'Clean and lock' sequence that we didn't have space to show in the tutorial. First, be aware that when you run the sequence and it asks you which files to work on, you can shift-click or command-click multiple PDF file names in the dialog. You can't, however, pick multiple files from different folders, so you'd best keep the PDFs you want to change in one folder, although they don't have to be the only files in that folder.

Second, take a closer look at the screenshot for step 4. When a command has a little square symbol next to its name in the list (such as next to Set Open Options and Security), you can click on it to activate user prompts. The little square then becomes a kind of 'dialog window' icon. When activated, this feature will pause for user input in the middle of the sequence when it's run. In the 'Clean and lock' sequence, for example, the automated routine could prompt you to enter fresh Open Options and unique Security settings for every PDF. This would be useful if you wanted to give each PDF a different password, for example. The speed of the automation would obviously be slower this way, but it's still a great deal quicker than calling up the Security commands manually from the menus over and over again.