Acrobat Magic

I go back to work, and suddenly I’m posting much shorter entries. Funny, that.

I encountered one of the Joys of Formatting today (those who format, no matter the program, will back me up on this) wherein someone found a mistake in a header after all the graphics pages were already made into PDFs. Rather than reopen (slowly I loooooooooooooad), change, and save (slowly I saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaave) each original page, I used Acrobat’s touch-up text tool. It’s a pretty awesome tool, but so far as I can tell, it operates under the rules of high wizardry.

I just wanted to remove a blank line from between two lines of text!  If had been in a word processor, that would have been one delete. But with the touch-up text tool, it became delete space/delete space/reset cursor with mouse/delete line/add line/move cursor to blank line/delete line…success! Except, of course, for those times when it was all of that, then …add a raft of spaces to approximate the correct justification that was lost. But only on about 1 in 5 pages.Why then? No one knows.

You laugh, of course. High wizardry is easy to dismiss as just a bunch of random things you happened to do the time it worked. But I had 30 pages to change, and I am a Scientist. I’ll have you know that I tried several experiments with not doing one of the steps above, and it only increased my contortions (fall to reset the cursor, for example, you lost the last letter of the first line in your delete, and had to retype it).

So now I feel some sympathy for all the apprentices out there collecting newt eyes and then cursing because they let them dry out before they could be used. High wizardry is a difficult road.