Newsletter Archives 

(These are edited, public editions)

September-Flash    September-PDF

(Note: starting with the Feb. '06 issue, we have switched to a different physical layout to save on postage costs. You may need to enlarge the pages on your screen to improve readabiity.)

See below for change in policy

(posted 3-3-05)

See the Flash Paper guide

Adobe Acrobat Reader/PDF Guide (rev. Jan. 10, 2005)

For those of you who have experienced difficulties opening
our newsletters within your web browsers, try the following:

Instead of clicking on the link to the PDF file within your web browser, right-click on it and select "save" to download the PDF file to a location of your choice on your computer's hard drive. When it's done, "open" that file, and any recent version of the Acrobat Reader (4 through 7) should be able to open it just fine. This works because it's not opening the file via the browser.

 

Based on versions 5/5.1 ("Adobe Acrobat Reader") and 6.0/7.0 (renamed the "Adobe Reader"). This is a simplified guide to this software's many powerful features. Use the Help function to delve further into this if you wish.

When you open a PDF file, your version of the Reader opens to the first page of your document.

The Reader is freely available from www.adobe.com.

The Document Window

Decide how much of each page you want to view at a time. Start with the sheet of paper icons across the top. The middle one ("fit in window") and the right one ("fit width") are the more useful. The former may make the print too small to read, however.

You also have the option of using the "+" or "-" buttons to magnify or reduce what you see. There's also a "zoom" function which gives more preset magnifications. Then there's a magnifying glass option which enables you to click in the document window to enlarge it by degrees, click and drag a rectangle around an area you want to enlarge, and reverse these processes by holding down CTRL + ALT (Windows PCs) and clicking with the magnifier to reduce.

Navigating Through the Document

There are a number of choices:

1. When the cursor looks like a hand, you can click and drag to scroll through a document.

2. Depressing the down or up arrow keys on the keyboard scrolls the document smoothly.

3. Click on the right-facing or left-facing arrowheads to advance a page at a time.

4. Click on the "thumbnail" or "pages" tab on the left to reveal small images of each page. Click on any page to display pages in any sequence. (For example, if you're on p. 1-the Contents page-and want to go immediately to the page listing Sunday Services, just click on the thumbnail image of the last page, and that will be displayed.)

Printing all or part of the document

You can print the document on standard plain paper, either one- or two-sided, regardless of the size of the original PDF document.

First, go to Print Setup and establish print options for your selected printer. This would include selection of paper size (letter), portrait orientation, and any special features like maximize margins, medium or high quality printing, or the like.

Then when you invoke the Print function, there are a number of useful options that appear:

Choose one or more of: "fit to paper," or "expand small pages to paper size," depending on your version. You will see a sample of how the document is re-sized automatically to print with your print settings without losing any information. The document is either made larger or smaller, depending on its relationship to letter-sized paper. In many cases, the page will actually be enlarged for printing. (Avoid using "shrink large pages" for our purposes since you won't get the desirable enlargement.)

If you don't wish to print the whole thing, choose the pages you wish to print.

If you want to save paper, choose the option to print odd-numbered pages separately from even-numbered ones. This gives you the chance to print one or the other set of pages, then re-insert the sheets to print the remaining pages on the backs of the ones just done.

Other

Space doesn't permit going into more details, but for the more technically oriented, we'd recommend looking into "preferences"/"options" that specify "fast web loading," "use page cache," and related features that could shorten the time before your first page appears.