I used to have Adobe Acrobat - not just the reader, but the full product. I don’t have it installed right now, because the only version that works with Vista is Acrobat Premium. Since I use Office 2007 to create most of my documents, I haven’t missed Acrobat much. Today, I ran into a situation where I needed it.

I had a client send me a PDF of a contract. They needed me to fill in my name, emails, phone numbers, address, and sign the thing. My handwriting is notoriously bad, so filling it in by hand wasn’t an option I wanted to use. Under XP, I would have fired up Acrobat and used the text tools to lay the information over the top of the empty boxes, printed the result, and FAXed that.

But, as I said, no Acrobat for me at the moment. What to do? The previous contract for this client I had hand filled in. Looked bad, and I knew it.

Brainstorm attack: Use SnagIt. I captured the page of the contract with SnagIt, then added the information needed with the text tool. The results I got the first time weren’t great. They were good enough, but they weren’t as clear as I wanted. Next time I do it, I will up the Image Resolution to something higher than the default of 96 dpi. The end result, after all, will need to be printed.

Hint 1: Don’t know how to change the resolution? Right click the SnagIt icon in the task bar, select Filters–> Image resolution. You will get this dialog:

Uncheck Auto configure, then you can change the DPI to anything. I’ve run tests as high as 5,000 DPI. Don’t know why you might want it that detailed, but it lets you do it.

Hint 2: How did I take the screen shot of a part of SnagIt? With OneNote of course! For screenshots of almost everything, I use SnagIt - But for screen shots of SnagIt I use OneNote’s clipping tool.

[tags]onenote, snagit, pdf, acrobat, vista [/tags]