[nfbcs] Acrobat Reader and JAWS

[Steve Jacobson]

There are a couple of things you can try.  While PDF documents can be a pain and the Acrobat Reader is sometimes frustrated, we are fortunate that PDF has 
emerged as a primary document format and that Adobe has been generally helpful even if not perfect.

First, in some manuals, using Acrobat Reader is worth while because there are often links to get one to different relevant parts of a document.  Even if the manual 
does not have links in its table of contents, often the entire table of content is present as bookmarks in the bookmark pane which can be accessed by pressing F6 a 
couple of times.  Often must of the sluggishness of Acrobat Reader can be eliminated by changing the "Reading Order" in the Preferences menu.  You can bring up 
the preferences menu by pressing CONTROL-K.  It is a multipage dialog and you should look for the "reading" tab.  The default reading order causes Acrobat 
Reader to try to sort things out for you.  It will sometimes put tabular data into tables, for example.  Generally, though, you can live without this extra processing.  
Choosing a reading order of Left to Right, Top to Bottom will greatly increase the responsiveness.

You can also force Acrobat Reader to load more than one page into the MSAA buffer which is used by the Window-eyes "Browse Mode" and JFW's Virtual Cursor.  
This can sometimes increase greatly the initial load time, though, and sometimes screen readers don't handle huge MSAA buffers efficiently.

Finally, you can usually save the entire PDF document to a text file.  You may find that viewing your manuals as text files with a good text editor is the best way to go.  
You loose all of the links, but I have found that using the "FIND" command of my text editor, UltraEdit is almost as fast as jumping to a link.

Some other OCR programs include PDF conversion tools. Kurzweil 1000 and OmniPage both do, and I think some of Omnipage's PDF tools are available separately.  
These tools will get text out of PDF's that have been scanned but not converted to text.  The results will be better and more convenient than printing and rescanning 
because you avoid the image degradation and of course the time.  it is my understanding that these tools are smart enough to extract the text when they can rather 
than doing OCR.  I have found that using the PDF conversion that comes with OmniPage and placing the results in Word often gives me a document that is 
formatted better than what I get with Acrobat Reader.

There are some PDF to Text tools out there as well and others can comment on these.  Jamal Mazrui has some of these on his web site at

http://www.empowermentzone.com

and these will convert PDF's to text.  He has built some of this into his text editor as well.  I have not tried the latest in this series, but I found that earlier versions 
worked very well but occasionally did not work or truncated files.  I already own OmniPage and have been so happy with the tools that came with that product that I 
have not explored much else recently.

I hope that this helps.  I had to throw this note together in a hurry, so let me know if something isn't clear.

Best regards,

Steve Jacobson

>----- Original Message ----- 
>From: "E.J. Zufelt" <everett at zufelt.ca>
>To: "NFBnet NFBCS Mailing List" <nfbcs at nfbnet.org>
>Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2008 11:51 PM
>Subject: [nfbcs] Acrobat Reader and JAWS


>Good evening,

>Is it just me, or is even the latest version of Acrobat Reader a real 
>pain
>to use with JAWS.  I have many reference manuals that I need to use that 
>are
>in PDF format and find the responsiveness of Acrobat when switching 
>pages to
>be sluggish at best.

>Any recommendations on improving performance or any other accessible PDF
>readers for Windows?

>Thanks,
>Everett



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