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What if I can’t find the InDesign file - can I open the PDF?
Questions
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Course info
Overview
- You will need a copy of Adobe InDesign CC 2018 or above. A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.
- No previous design skills are needed.
- No previous InDesign skills are needed.
- 76 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.
- You'll learn to design a flyer, newsletter, brochure, annual report & business cards.
- Learn how to create PDF files ready for printing.
- You will get the finished files so you never fall behind.
- Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet.
- Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew.
- Techniques used by professional graphic designers.
- Professional workflows and shortcuts.
- A wealth of other resources and websites to help your new career path.
- No previous InDesign experience is necessary.
- This course is for people completely new to InDesign. No previous design or publishing experienced is necessary.
- This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce most common publications. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with our course.
Course duration 6 hours 20 mins + your study.
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
Certificates
We’re awarding certificates for this course!
Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.
Downloads & Exercise files
Transcript
Okay, let's say we can't find the InDesign file, we only have the PDF. Can we open up the PDF in InDesign, and start editing it? No, it's not possible, you can place it, and it will stick it in like an image, but you can't adjust it. The way to adjust it is that hopefully you're a Creative Cloud subscriber and you've got something called Acrobat Pro or Acrobat DC. If you don't have that installed, go and do that. On my Mac here, there's a little icon, 'Apps'. Mine's called Acrobat DC, that's the current version of it. And if yours is not installed, install it. On a PC, I think the same icon is in the bottom right. And what you want to do is, find your PDF, download it from your email, or wherever you've got it, right click it, and say 'Open With', and make sure it goes into 'Adobe Acrobat'.
Now, because this is the Pro version, and the paid version, mine's called Acrobat Pro DC. If yours is Acrobat Reader it's not going to do any of this. But because you're a Creative Cloud license user, it's going to work, and what we're going to do, over here on the right is one called 'Edit PDF'. Now, don't get your hopes up too much, you can do additions, you can add images, but can't start swapping around and using it like InDesign. It's very, very cave men.
Now I'm going to make sure I'm on 'Edit'. Along the top here, let's say our address has changed, I can change it to '100'. It's really slow, and clunky, and jumpy. So I can do that, no problem. I'm going to scroll down a little bit. And you can see here, let's say I just need to change this, so it's just a typo or price change. Jumpy, jumpy, that's okay. So you can do basic stuff in here. Basic formatting, you can add images, add text. Add text, click and drag out a box. I'm still waiting for this to catch back up. Mine's a pretty hard core Mac, and it's a little bit-- hey, here it is, it's back.
So that's kind of last ditch, you just want to make some basic amends, and you don't have the InDesign files, you can do it here in Acrobat Pro. Now we've done it in Acrobat Pro. This method works in Illustrator often as well. Illustrator has some pros and cons to it. A little bit harder to use Illustrator if you've never used it before, but there's a little bit more formatting and layout changes you can do, so try either this one, this is the easy version, or Adobe Illustrator, and open your PDF in there, and make changes.
All right, that's it for this video. I hope that's helped. Let's get into the next tutorial.
