So that was number four, what about number five? I'm going to go ahead and close up memo and I'm going to jump over to my good old friend, the internet. And I said my good old friend, the internet because I use it as research tool frequently.
In this case here, I need to show the weather information for a particular town in the State of Maine. Perhaps I'm building a proposal and I want to show that the particular town is a good place to be because the weather is always good. I go to the www.weather.gov website and I looked and I see that because it’s white that means there are weather warnings for the entire State of Maine, that’s a good thing that helps me make my case.
However, if I just send the person that I'm trying to convince to this website on a different day, and that different day happens to be a bad weather day in the State of Maine my case has been completely destroyed. So what I really want to do here is capture this information as it is, I don’t want that sort of dynamic nature that the web has to offer. When I install Adobe Acrobat onto system, it will allow me to produce PDF files directly from websites.
Now again, if you're a Windows user there is a couple of added bits of functionality, for example, right into the Internet Explorer if you look up in the upper right hand corner there is a PDF maker button. I can click to convert the current webpage in it’s entirely to a PDF or if I like I can actually grab just some specific information. So I just want the weather map and these little keys. So we’ll scroll down a little bit and right click and convert just the selection to Adobe PDF.
That’s pretty handy to do especially if you're doing research on a website that’s filled with Ads on either side. You can kind of eliminate those Ads and just grab that research information. But I'm all about control, I like to control the process and so what I'm going to do instead is I'm going to go into Acrobat to perform this conversion.
First, I’ll drag select the URL and I'm going to right click on it to choose copy. Or if I don’t have a right button mouse, I can choose Edit, Copy to copy the URL. And I've done that because now I can go over into Acrobat and from the create PDF task button, this time I'm going to choose from web page. And that brings up the create PDF from web page dialog box and the reason I copied the URL as I did and so that I can quickly paste it right into this dialog box here. I’ll paste it in, this is a lot more helpful when you have those sort of long URLs that have all kinds of different paths in them. Obviously weather.gov is an easy one but sometimes you might want to grab something that’s pretty deep in the website.
And when you're doing that, you also want to determine what you're going to grab. In this case I only want that one level. I can get two levels down, three levels down or whatever. Be careful though because if you do that you're going to end up grabbing a lot of information and heaven forbid you ever select get entire site. It could take all day, week or even month to capture that entire website depending on whose website you’re grabbing.
Now I said it was about control and that’s why I came in here. The control that I want is found under the settings option. If I select page layout, I want to make sure that it set to Landscape. The reason that I want to make sure that it set to Landscape is because if you look at your common web pages, they're kind of Landscape oriented. They're not Portrait oriented and so you could choose that, but then things are going to look a little bit funny when you convert the web page.
So you want to make sure that that’s set that way and then once you’ve configured that select okay, nothing has happened yet. Click on create and then Acrobat will go ahead and convert that web page to a PDF file for you and here you are.
Now a couple of things that aren’t necessarily obvious right away are important to note. First off, it creates bookmarks for you and that’s handy and I’ll show you specifically why that’s handy in a moment. I'm going to zoom all the way out on this page, so that we fit in the Window and I want roll my cursor over parts of the State of Maine. And if you look, you can see that my cursor changes it becomes a little pointing finger with a W in it. That W is an indication that if I were to click on this right now I would actually go out to a browser, it would load that URL that’s listed there into the web browser for me so that I can use this as essentially a launching pad back to this information. But that’s not what I want to do instead what I want to do is add whatever is behind that URL to this PDF file by appending it. And to do that I'm going to hold the Shift key down and when I do that notice that my little pointing finger no longer has a W on top of it, but a Plus sign. That’s an indication that when I click Acrobat isn't going to take me out to the web browser, it’s going to pull what would be in the web browser into another page of this PDF. Let me show you. All I need to do is click.
Now the security running is something that the operating system is just trying to say, look, an application is trying to talk to the internet are you sure you want this happen? Yes, I do want this to happen, so I'm going to select allow, Acrobat will do its magic and it will add that information to this PDF file as another page. That’s why the Bookmark is so important because now I can go back to the first page or go to the second page. And if I go back to the first page and I roll over this link now, it’s no longer a link out to what's on the website, but it’s an internal link in the PDF file. What this means is that I can build a very interactive document to mirror how the web tends to work. The web is a very interactive place, you kind to follow a link from one place to another. By using the Acrobat, not only can you follow links from place to another, but you can build those rights into your documents, so that the document works exactly the same way the website did.
But there is one more thing that I want to point out. If you notice up in the upper left hand corner there was a local forecast by city and state. And I'm interested in providing forecast information for a particular city in the State of Maine. So what I'm going to do is enter information into that for moment that was converted from html into the PDF file. So type information in for the City of Bangor, Maine. When I click go, it will actually go out, grab the information pull it back into the PDF file and provide me with the third page that in this case is the National Weather Service Forecast for the City of Bangor, Maine.
So if you think about what I've just done, I've converted web information which is very dynamic and ever changing into more static information that I can use in the process of building say a proposal to talk about how good weather is in the City of Bangor, Maine. Without having to depend on that weather staying the same, because as I grab it, I'm making it static not dynamic information. Yet, I maintained the dynamic nature of the information that is important, for example, the internal linking that allows me to get around within the document very, very quickly. It’s very, very neat technology and as the fifth way of creating a PDF file, it’s pretty important stuff.
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