Sign your Documents in Acrobat

Use stamps to sign your document without the need of printing them and scanning them later.
Català - Castellano - Deutsch
Nowadays, more and more applications mean filling up forms and sending them electronically. Many people like to print those forms, fill them up, sign them, scan them and then send them back. I personally prefer to do a everything in my computer. It helps me keep track of my applications and to have a record of my documents, plus I think an applications typed in the computer looks more professional.

So this post is for those who like to do that. I normally download the application PDFs, use the typewriter to fill out the different fields and when it comes to signing the document I used to find a problem. Acrobat doesn't let you insert an image that easily. I have my signature scanned and I use it in word documents, but in PDFs is not that easy. I found the solution not so long ago.

Acrobat has a feature called stamps. You can set up a custom Stamp, and used a JPEG scanned version of your signature. To create a custom stamp see the image below, it is under Comments & markup.


Once you have the custom stamp created follow the same path but this time go to Sign Here (or whatever subcategory you used to save the custom stamp) and add the stamp, your signature, to the document. On the image below you can see the custom stamp with a random signature I found on the internet ready to be used.


That's it, now you can avoid completely to print your documents. For me it is not a question of beeing green, but a question of beeing practical, I move a lot, and sometimes work in coffee shops, I not always have a printer ready, so with this system I do not need to stop what I am doing to wait till I get access to a printer and a scanner.

Cheers

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Design Review Programs

See two options to digitally review your drawings
Català - Castellano - Deutsch
The two following videos show how o do basic design review operations with two programs. The first shows the operations done in Adobe Acrobat Pro, the second, the same done in Autodesk Design Review. This is part of my research to create a Quality Assurance system using big format touch screen and a Design review Software.





As you can see, with both software packages the same can be achieved. So probably the 642€ per license for Acrobat Pro are not worth paying if the only thing you need is to do this type of operations. Autodesk Design Review is a free application. it can be downloaded here.



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Acrobat Pro: Turn Scaned Documents into Readable Ones

Turn scanned documents into readable (and searchable) ones with a built in function of Adobe Acrobat Professional
Català - Castellano - Deutsch
This is again a bit far from the usual trend of posts, but bear with me, I've been doing a lot of writing and copy and paste lately, so not so much SketchUp and Revit fun for some days.
This quick tip is regarding scanned documents. Some times you might need to work with them. Someone sends you a scanned pdf and you wish you could use part of that thext without retyping it. Well you can with just a few clicks.
The tip is assuming you have Adobe Acrobat Pro installed. What you need to do is simply open the PDF in Acrobat Pro (not in Acrobat Reader) and go to Document --> OCR Text Recognition --> Recognize Text Using OCR. See the image below.


After clicking on it, we will get a screen that will let us choose the OCR Language. It is important to select the right language, especially for those languages with special caracters. My mother tongue, catalan has these characters for example: à, è, é, í, ò, ó, ú, ç, l·l. If you don't select the right language some of this characters will be interpreted wrong. Like for instance ó tends to be read as a number 6 if you leave English as a language when scanning in Catalan or Spanish.


The Output is here called "Searchable Image". This is actually a great feature, because it keeps the image almost intact, while allowing you to search for the document on a full text search query.

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