Adobe Experience Manager DAM (CQ5) has had the ability to generate thumbnail previews of InDesign…
Tag: Tutorial
If you are installing Adobe CQ5, you’ll love the fact that FFmpeg integration is supported out of the box. The bad news is that due to licensing restrictions Adobe does not bundle FFmpeg with the standard CQ installation. Another issue is that the “standard” FFmpeg build does not include support for H264 which is useful for video playback on iOS devices etc.
Given that I had to repeat the installation process recently after reinstalling my MacBook AIR with Mountain Lion, I took some notes compiled from a few different sites into one quick cheat sheet. Note that this will take at least an hour to complete due to the need to download and compile a bunch of stuff.
Note: This is a repost of an article published in Australian Personal Computer (APC Mag) in January 2010
Adobe Acrobat Professional can do much than just create static PDFs. The Professional version creates interactive forms that collect data.
To start creating your form, open up Acrobat and select the Forms->Start Forms Wizard then choose between one of the options:
An existing electronic document – Converts a Word, Excel or other file types to PDF, then automatically detects & creates interactive form fields based on the existing artwork. You can then modify or add extra fields.
A paper form – Acrobat will use your connected scanner to scan a paper document, recognise the text with OCR, then recognize and creates interactive form fields based on the existing artwork.
No existing form – Windows users can open the bundled LiveCycle Designer application. LiveCycle Designer allows you to either design a form from scratch by dragging and dropping form objects or using one of the many bundled templates
Given that I often demonstrate Adobe’s server products (LiveCycle ES and others) I typically have a server centric environment on a VMWare image stored locally on my laptop. I have (finally) upgraded my demonstration environment from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008 R2. Since I often get asked how and why I set up my demo environment the way I do, I’ve captured some notes and share them
I won’t cover the actual OS installation, so i’ll assuming the OS & drivers are installed and you’ve run Windows update. First, in order to make the OS look slightly more familiar, I install the Desktop Experience feature using Server Manager, or with the following command line:
- ServerManagerCmd -i Desktop-Experience
This will install the Windows Aero and other desktop themes, along with a lot of other programs that go into Vista by default (Windows Media Player, Windows Photo Gallery, etc.). Next, you need to set the Themes service to Automatic and start it. For Windows Server 2008 R2:
- Click Control Panel > Appearance and Personalization
- Click Personalization and select the Aero Theme
Stop the annoying Windows server shutdown event tracker. Each time you reboot you have to log a reason why… useful in production, but ANNOYING in development & demo.
Note: This is a repost of an article published in Australian Personal Computer (APC Mag) in May 2010
Adobe’s online service, Acrobat.com, is free, has great apps and lets you share files.
Sharing electronic documents can be a real challenge and we often find ourselves dealing with bounced emails, FTP accounts and other issues. Adobe’s free Acrobat.com cloud based service was designed to make it easy to share information quickly and easily and is a combination of many useful features, including a word processor [that I’m writing this article with), a presentation and tables tool, web conferencing and more.
UPLOADING
For this article we’ll be focusing on sharing files. First you need a free Acrobat.com account. Browse to http://acrobat.com and click the Sign Up button. Enter your email address, create a password and other details, then click Sign Up and you are ready to go.
Once logged in, you will see a list of your files. These are stored online and can be accessed by anyone that you give permission to [and anywhere). Let’s start by uploading a file of your own. In the ‘Actions’ palette on the left-hand side, click on ‘Upload’ and then browse and select the file you wish to upload.
Click on the file name, and if you uploaded a PDF then Acrobat.com will l show you a preview. You can zoom in and out and navigate through the pages. To download the file again, click ‘Download’ to copy the file back to your computer. No matter where you go now, you can store and access up to 5GB of files on any computer by browsing to Acrobat.com and logging in.
Today I ran a live eSeminar introducing LiveCycle Designer ES2. In this session I covered how to build forms from scratch, included some tips and tricks along the way and included some of the latest features available in the latest Designer ES2 release.
The session was recorded and includes over 45 minutes of me demonstrating how to build a complete form from scratch. The recording is here;
My colleagues from Adobe’s Benelux technical team have come up with another great use case for my custom LiveCycle ES Twitter Component I built some time ago.
Anyone with a corporate shared Twitter account will understand the conflict between being open and allowing anyone to post a tweet vs making sure that only correct public information is exposed. This solution built out using Adobe LiveCycle ES & Flash Builder is one way of solving this issue.
Part 1 – Build a controlled tweet solution
Building a controlled Twitter solution using Adobe LiveCycle ES (part1) from Dr LiveCycle on Vimeo. Part 1 of a video that demonstrates how you can use LiveCycle ES to build a process