Printing Sticky Notes On A PDF

More good stuff from the Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog. This time on printing sticky notes on a pdf.

Sticky Notes are probably the most common method used to add notes and comments to PDF documents.

To add a Sticky Note, simply right-click anywhere on the page and choose Add Sticky Note. A sticky note will appear and you can add text to it easily.

Sticky notes can be minimized so that they don't cover up your document, or left open so you can see the text inside:

One frequent question I get is how to print pages with the contents of the sticky note showing.

In this article, you'll discover how to print a document with the sticky notes showing in Acrobat.

Set a Preference to Print Sticky Notes

Acrobat does not normally print sticky notes. You'll need to change a preference to enable printing of notes.

Choose Edit> Preferences and click on the Commenting category.

A) Choose the Segoe UI font matches print output better
B) Optional: Set Pop-up Opacity to 100%
C) Enable Print Notes and Comments
D) Disable pop-up scrolling (Makes it easier to position notes)

What is Pop-up Opacity? By default, Sticky Notes have a transparency of 85%. Viewed on screen or in print, the page beneath the sticky note will be visible. If you prefer on-screen and printed notes to have a solid white background, you can change it to 100%.

Positioning the Sticky Notes for Print

Acrobat does not provide a 1 to 1 correspondence between the appearance of sticky notes on-screen and your printed output.

I had best results with my document viewed at 75%.

You will need to spend some time positioning the Sticky Notes where you want them to print.

Printing the PDF with the Sticky Notes

To print the document, choose File>Print.

Before clicking the Print button, ensure that you are printing the PDF with the Document and Markups setting:

Acrobat will show you a preview of the page as it will print. Sometimes, the printed view of the note might not show all of the text in the note. If that is the case, you will see a small black symbol on the corner of the note in the preview window.

What does it look like when printed?

Here's an example below:

What about Adobe Reader?
Adobe Reader does not provide a way to print the contents of sticky notes. Sorry, you will need at least Acrobat Standard.

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Android Tablets On The Way

The success of Apple's iPad has been nothing short of breathtaking! For those in the know, the idea of a tablet/slate computer is nothing new. They have been around for years. Unfortunately, they have always been driven by sluggish, cumbersome, buggy Microsoft Windows operating systems. Then along comes Apple and you get a tablet computer the way it was originally envisioned: thin, light, handy, and efficient. With the success of the iPad, the next best thing in operating systems -- the Android OS -- is catching the tablet wave. From Larry Dignan and ZDNet.com comes an update on Android and the tablet revolution.

The Android tablets are coming and this time Apple won’t have a big head start. Will value tablets sell?

Dell’s Streak (top right), a 5-inch tablet powered by Android, launched Tuesday in the U.K. and the device will come to the U.S. later in the summer. The Streak has integration with the Android market and a few other goodies that may attract buyers, according to Dell.

Meanwhile, Pandigital has its Novel, another Android-powered device. The Novel (bottom right) is a 7-inch touchscreen device also powered by Android. Joel Evans calls the Novel a poor man’s iPad at $199.

Get used to it. There’s an army of “poor man’s iPads” on deck. Note these devices won’t be iPad killers or anything, but Apple legitimized the tablet form factor and the followers are lining up. There will be multiple Android tablets waiting in the wings.

Last year’s netbook is this year’s tablet. Om Malik notes that Android has trumped Google’s Chrome OS. Jason Hiner wonders if Android is the Windows of smartphones. One thing is clear: Android has proven to adapt to multiple devices. And like Google’s smartphone efforts, the aim appears to be to surround Apple.

The big difference with the Android tablet army is that the Apple iPad doesn’t have much of a head start. Apple’s iPhone had a few years on the first Android device. Google’s Android platform is growing quickly, but isn’t likely to catch the iPhone in terms of smartphone market share any time soon. Google’s Android will be a solid No. 3 in smartphones.

However, tablets are a different story. Apple’s iPad isn’t as expensive as originally thought, but it’s not going to be $199 any time soon. Android tablets will hit that price point. Just to reiterate: None of these Android devices are going to matter to Apple, which doesn’t sweat market share standings.

The big question is how long it takes an Android tablet equivalent to the HTC Droid Incredible to form. The Incredible is a solid iPhone rival, but Apple had a few years to establish the its smartphone before real rivals surfaced. The iPad is a big success, but will only have a head start of a quarter or two before Android tablets appear everywhere.

Can Android tablets reach feature parity on the iPad while squeezing Apple on price?

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Thoughts on Mining for Referrals

Referrals should, could, are the life blood of a successful family law practice. From her Legal Ease Blog Allison Shields offers sage advice on how to go about getting referrals from your existing client base.

Are you building relationships or 'mining' for business?

A lawyer recently sought advice from a group of peers on a list-serve about marketing his practice and mining his current and former clients for business. While there is nothing wrong with the concept of trying to build your practice through referrals from current and former clients (in fact, I encourage it), lawyers need to be careful about the way they approach these business development efforts.

There has been an increasing shift towards viewing a law practice as a business with economic realities that must be faced and one of the biggest economic realities for any law practice (and indeed, any business) is that without clients, the practice does not exist. The most important person in any law practice is the client. But, as Duncan Manley, a lawyer whom I like and respect, recently wrote in the Primerus Paradigm magazine (I've written about the Primerus organization before, here and here) for law firms especially, marketing is all about building relationships.

In order to gain the confidence of your existing clients, to develop a loyal client base who will refer business to you over time, Manley reminds us that the clients needs to "know that you are a good lawyer,...have confidence in your ability,...trust you and know that you are genuinely concerned about them and their company." But this knowledge and trust, almost by definition, must be built over time. It is never built by focusing primarily on yourself, your firm, your knowledge, expertise, legal skill, etc.

My advice to the lawyer I referenced at the beginning of this post was to focus more on building relationships with existing and former clients (and other professionals and strategic partners as well), rather than focusing on your own desire to make connections or to build your practice.

You need to be careful about making clients, former clients and strategic alliances feel that you’re completely in this for you, or that you’re browbeating them or making them feel guilty about not referring you to others. If people feel even the smallest bit turned off, if they feel that someone is attempting to control them, use them for their connections or make them feel guilty, there’s going to be a backlash – even, and maybe especially if they do refer someone else to you in the short run.

The approach, “Have you recommended me to someone in the industry? Why not?” is all about you and your business, not about the client and their business, or the client as a person, colleague or friend. Newsletters, personal letters and gifts are nice, but it’s the long term relationship and genuine caring about clients and their businesses that is going to drive referrals to your door.

You certainly want to make sure that all of your clients and former clients know what you do, what you can do (if it is different than what you did for them), and who you’d like to do it for. It also doesn’t hurt sometimes to ask them to make a specific connection for you or to suggest that you’d love to work with others like them, or ask if they know anyone who might benefit from your services. But you need to do it at the right time and in the right way.

Rather than focusing on what connections your clients and former clients can make for you, think about what connections you can make for them. Show an interest in them as people, both inside and outside of business. Keep your eyes and ears open for ways to help them grow and prosper - even if they're completely unrelated to your practice, or even to the law.

If you come at this from the perspective of giving to your clients, helping them grow and succeed and developing relationships with them, rather than just trying to use them or squeeze additional business or referrals out of them, you’re more likely to meet with success.

Take a page from Duncan Manley's playbook. He says,

I like people, clients or not, and I like lawyers. I like to talk to them. I like to find out about what they do, who they know, where they live and whether they like to fly fish, jog or ride horses....One time I had a client who told me I asked more questions than anyone he had ever known....I am guilty, but that is the only way to find out about people, and they know I wouldn't be asking those questions if I wasn't interested in them. I think we all want to be liked by others.

People respond to your genuine interest in and care and concern for them. When they like you and feel that you like them, the business will follow - even when you don't expect it.
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JD Supra

JD Supra is a site that is getting more of my attention lately. It lets you create an impressive online portfolio of your articles, newsletters, alerts, court filings, and presentations in minutes. Then, it helps you get noticed (by prospective clients, colleagues and the media), so you can concentrate on doing what you do best – great work!

On his Legal Practice Pro blog Jay Fleischman give us a nice JD Supra overview.

Online legal marketing involves content creation andcontent distribution; doing so enables us to showcase our knowledge and establish trust with our prospective clients.

One of the best content distribution sites for lawyers is JDSupra, run by a team of awesome and smart people who want nothing more than to give you the widest possible exposure for your content. JDSupra is not only highly-trafficked and well-indexed, but the service provides a number of feature-rich Facebook pages and widgets to pump content out far more effectively than would otherwise be possible.

In the interests of full disclosure, I had the chance to meet with the JDSupra team while in California last month for the annual National Association of Consumer Bankruptcy Attorneys convention. Aviva Cuyler bought me a turkey sandwich and a Diet Coke while I was hanging around with Adrian Lurssen (I think she was worried I’d pass out from hunger because I’d been talking with Adrian for so long). That might be something warranting FTC disclosure, though I did offer to pay her for lunch.

In fact, this graph from compete.com shows that JDSupra has grown by 226% in the past 12 months alone. Pretty impressive, no?

JDSupra Traffic Graphic" height="160" width="300">

But using JDSupra as a distribution mechanism is still new to lots of lawyers, so I thought I’d share how I use it as part of my online legal marketing efforts.

4 steps, that’s all it takes. Ready? OK, here we go (and by the way – if you click the pictures they will open up full-size so you don’t have to squint):

Step One: Choose “Post A Document”

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Step Two: Choose “Legal Article/Newsletter,” upload the PDF document, add the title of the document (which should be the title of the blog post), and add the “Document Date” (which will be the date on which you are uploading the content.

JDSupra Tutorial 2" height="219" width="300">

Step Three: Scroll down and choose your category. My stuff is usually related to either bankruptcy or legal marketing, so those are my go-to categories. Then, for document summary, enter the first 1,000 characters of the content.

JDSupra Tutorial 3" height="219" width="300">

Step Four: Click “Continue,” then “Submit.” (or “Submit & Post Another Doc” as the case may be).

JDSupra Tutorial 4" height="219" width="300">

That entire process should take you about 3 minutes. Greater distribution for your content marketing, better results from your online legal marketing efforts, and the basic level of service is entirely free.

So are you using JDSupra?

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