July 18, 2002
Please feel free to invite some of your colleagues from your or another
city/county if you think it would benefit them to be part of our group.
Attendees
Susan Waters, Overland Park
Rich Lovett, KCMO
Chris Holdman, Olathe
John Howell, Kansas on the Net
Susan Howell, Kansas on the Net
Mike Davidson, Johnson Co.
Bridget Moser, Shawnee
Kandie Manchion, Shawnee
Sonya Fendorf, Shawnee
Roman Madrigal, Shawnee PD
Kelli Behr, Gladstone
Maria Beermann-Foat, Johnson Co. Med-Act
Norman Shriver, Belton PD
Randy Griffin, Belton
Kevin Whelan, Johnson Co.
Barbara Hensley, MARC
Government, Public Webmanagers Only
Rich asked if we should allow people from private companies to
participate in the listserv. There had been a few complaints (from Susan) about being contacted from these folks
in the private sector after sending out questions over the listserv. We don't want the listserv to turn into a
place for tech companies to find leads. After discussion, there seemed to be a consensus that we should restrict
the listserv to government webmasters.
MARC's Shopping Cart Feature
After researching their options, MARC opted to go with Wells
Fargo's e-store for their online purchases. The e-store is Web-based and quick and easy.
It costs $50 a month to operate and charges a very small credit card percentage. It can also take electronic checks.
There is no long-term contract required; it is on a month-to-month basis.
The e-store can be set up via phone with someone from Wells Fargo walking you through the process.
The way it works:
- An "add to cart" image (on MARC's site), when clicked, takes the user to a specific page with payment/registration options.
- The user fills out the page and all info and submits (credit card info is never in MARC's hands).
- An auto-reply, written by MARC, is sent to the user.
- MARC staff can get into their section of e-store and click button to process the payment or delete it if is a duplicate or mistake entry.
- MARC staff can view reports and data in several formats and download if needed.
The e-store doesn't require your agency to have a Wells Fargo bank account.
For more information, contact Barbara Hensley, bhensley@marc.org.
Adobe Acrobat PDF Tips
Creating Bookmarks:
- From the Magnification pop-up menu, choose the magnification desired (standard=100%). A bookmark always displays a page at the magnification set when the bookmark was created.
- Click on the triangle in the upper right corner of the Bookmarks palette to display the Bookmark palette menu, and choose New Bookmark, click Ctrl+B or right mouse click and select New Bookmark. A new bookmark appears at the bottom of the Bookmarks palette, and the text is selected.
- Type in the name for your bookmark.
- After creating a bookmark, you can easily move it to its proper place in the Bookmark palette by dragging. (This will not move the order of the pages in the document.)
- If you want the bookmarks to be visible to a user when the document is opened, select File > Document Properties > Open Options and select "Bookmarks and Page."
Interactive PDF forms:
Rich walked us through making PDF forms interactive. Keep in
mind, we are not talking about forms that are able to capture the data and e-mail or process it. These are forms
where the user is able to type on the form for printing-out purposes. To allow for the data to be captured, you
would need some sort of CGI program to do it and none of us were quite sure how that would work.
Rich found that the best way to create a PDF from a document where you don't have a digital copy, mainly black
and white text or forms, is to scan it in as black and white, not grayscale image, into Photoshop. Clean it up
using the Photoshopo tools. Use Acrobat PDFWriter at 200 dpi to output the PDF. He had some PDF forms as small
as 8k.
Use the Form Tool (next to the crop tool, or hit F to activate) to draw a box around a field for text entry. A
window will pop up. Name the field and use the options to create the look for the field needed. When a user holds
his/her cursor over the field, a text cursor will show up. The user can click in the field and begin to type. The
Tab key will allow the user to move from field to field. Text fields can be formatted to display numbers in percentages,
dates or times.
Besides text boxes, you can make fields that are check boxes, radio buttons and drop-down lists. These options
can be found in the Field Properties box under type.
If you have a simple mathematical formula on your form, Acrobat can compute it for you. In the Field Properties
of the field that will hold the total/sum, select the Calculate tab and "Value is the sum of the following
fields," then pick your fields to add together.
The one problem with these fields is that the user doesn't really have a visual clue that they can type on the
form except for the cursor-over. You could give the fields a lightly shaded background color, but that will show
up when the form is printed.
We also briefly touched on a few document tools in Acrobat:
- To add pages to a PDF or combine two PDFs into one: Document > Insert Pages.
- To take some pages out of a PDF and make them their own file: Document > Extract Pages.
- To delete pages: Document > Delete pages. (Duh.)
- If only one page/section in the document has changed, you can replace it: Document > Replace pages.
August Meeting: Accessibility Tips
For August, we will have a guest speaker, Diana Persell, Director
of Creative Services from National Information Consortium, to give us some accessibility tips and answer questions
about how to improve the usability of our Web sites. The August meeting will be at 10:30 a.m. Thursday, Aug. 15,
at MARC.
If you have any ideas for future topics or guest speakers, please share them with Rich Lovett, KCMO, (rich_lovett@kcmo.org) or Susan Waters, Overland Park (sjwaters@opkansas.org).
SJW