Acrobat Portfolios

With the introduction of Acrobat version 9, Adobe has introduced a new feature called "portfolios" — a confusingly bad choice of terminology for us photographers, but a very interesting concept.

Imagine gathering a number of documents together into one all-encompassing container-of-a-PDF. That's a portfolio. The documents gathered could be PDFs themselves, Word documents, spreadsheets, videos, audios, in essence almost anything. The encompassing PDF acts like a container to hold all these disparate components and creates a unified interface for viewing all of them. Acrobat portfolios are binders with intuitive and easy cross-document navigation built in. They are just a PDF, albeit "super PDFs."

We've been experimenting with this concept for a while now and found a number of uses that are quite interesting. One example is our LensWork Folios Catalog — a collection of separate PDFs, one for each folio we've published, all bound together into a catalog via the Acrobat Portfolio concept. You can download this file (61 mb) and take a look at this new concept. (Remember, this is an Acrobat 9 feature, so you'll need Reader version 9 or greater to open this file.)

I could easily see this as a way for a photographer to gather a number of separate publications together into one PDF for easier distribution. Or imagine a main PDF publication that also includes a number of support documents — say a video, or a printable sample, perhaps a form your client needs to fill out, or publicity photos.

Did I mention you can add simple JPEG files as a component of a PDF portfolio? Say you want to send out a show announcement as a press kit. You could include a PDF inside the portfolio that contains a selection of the exhibition images, a Word document with details about the show, a couple of JPEGs as press kit images, and a video invitation to the opening. All these would appear inside the PDF "portfolio" as separate documents, but all obviously part of the single press kit. (Any of the component documents can be extracted by the viewer from the Portfolio container. Be sure you've added security to any PDF before you drop it into the portfolio. BTW, the portfolio PDF itself can also be secured with a password.)

It's an idea that has lots of potential. Check it out.

Comments

[Joe Lipka]

I have been contemplating a portfolio project covering work I have completed in the past year. My original thought was to link together several pdf publications. Certainly a serviceable solution but the adobe portfolio is a much more elegant solution to this problem. Now I get to learn something new to give more polish to the presentation of my work.
Isn't it amazing the evolution that we have experienced in the past decade or so...
A singular image matted, framed and hung on a wall.
A portfolio box of mounted prints.
A web presentation
Self published pdf documents
The folio / as loose prints or pdf documents
The adobe portfolio
And that is just presentation.
But no matter how much razzle, dazzle and sizzle you pile on, it still goes back to content of the image. Razzle, dazzle and sizzle for its own sake doesn't last very long.

[Godfrey DiGiorgi]

Hi Brooks!

It's an idea that definitely has potential, but IMO it needs to be an accepted, agreed upon standard for use across all operating systems and implemented at the OS level, rather than as a feature supported by a specific version of a specific reading application, to be truly useful and obtain the universality that is its domain.

A "universal container" data format that is accessible through only one application mechanism isn't very universal to me. Now if Adobe could get Microsoft, Apple, UNIX, and Linux OS providers to agree to support it and build that support into their respective OS products, then we'd be cookin'.

[Brooks Jensen]

You might be right, but pending that blissful day, the PDF is about as universal a cross-document file format as we've ever seen, so I think we'd be short-sighted to overlook its potential. Besides, the concept of a "universal" file format is sort of an oxymoron when you consider how many people have no computer literacy whatsoever.

Brooks

[Douglas R Winn]

Sheesh--I downloaded your catalog...it took about a minute...and there it was. A very slick tool, and the content of your catalog viewed very nicely, giving a very professional impression. Can it go to full screen?

[Brooks Jensen]

Thanks!

Nope. For some unknown reason (I think it's a legitimate bug), portfolio PDFs melt down in full screen mode. Perhaps Adobe will address this in the future, but in the meantime, no FULL SCREEN mode for portfolios.

Brooks

[Bentley Nelson]

Brooks,
I've downloaded your latest folio catalog with the Portfolio feature and, although you can't make the Portfolio interface go full screen, you can make the individual folios go Full Screen under Adobe Reader's "View" menu. (Adobe Reader 9.3.1 on the Mac.) If Adobe made Full Screen available in the Portfolio view they would have a much more elegant interface -- one becoming of a "design" company, not just a technology one. The Portfolio interface should not look like an afterthought. After all, it's the cover of a book!

[Brooks Jensen]

Yes, I couldn't agree more about the need for Adobe to improve. It's a nice first step, though, so now we need to see where it goes.

Yes, the individual PDFs inside the portfolio can be opened full screen -- and in fact we have configured ours to do so. I still prefer the full screen presentation which just seems more polished and like I'm looking at a finished thing rather than a computer page.

Brooks