WHAT IS ADOBE ACROBAT?

Adobe Acrobat is a software program that allows you to view, search and print pages from electronic
(computer-based) publications. PEH on CD-ROM was created with Adobe Acrobat and you will use
Adobe Acrobat to look at this product. When you performed the install procedure, the process copied
Adobe Acrobat onto your computer's hard drive and it is now available for you to look at this CD-ROM
publication.
LEARNING TO USE PEH ON CD-ROM
Like any tool, using PEH on CD-ROM requires a little practice. The best way to learn how to use the CDROM application is to read the Online Help Guide included with PEH on CD-ROM. To open the online
guide, follow these steps:
Windows:

Select Help from the Acrobat menu bar, and then select Reader Online
Guide from the menu list.

Macintosh:

Click on the Acrobat Balloon Help icon and drag down to Reader Online
Guide.

In each case, Acrobat will open the Adobe Acrobat Reader Online Guide. You can select topics of
interest by placing the hand cursor on top of a highlighted word and clicking the mouse button or you can
turn pages by pressing the Page Down button on the keyboard. When you are done looking at the Online
Guide, choose File > Close from the menu. This will close the Online Guide and return you to the
publication.
We encourage you to experiment with PEH on CD-ROM. The information on the CD-ROM is permanent
and cannot be erased or changed, so experiment with the buttons on the tool bar and find out what each
of them does. PEH on CD-ROM is a powerful tool. The more that you know about its features, the more
productive you can be with its content.
CHANGING THE DEFAULT MAGNIFICATION FOR LOOKING AT THE PUBLICATION
Everyone has different preferences on how to read a publication. Magnification (or preferred size of the
letters) is different for everyone. In addition, some computer monitors display information more clearly
than others, making the amount of magnification you need also a function of your computer hardware.
You can change the magnification of the publication by choosing View > Zoom To from the menu, or
by pressing the Magnification button in the status bar on the bottom of the window. In addition, you can
set the default magnification (the normal magnification whenever you open a publication) by choosing
File > Preferences > General... from the menu bar. From the General Preferences dialog, change
Default Magnification to suit your needs and then click OK. You should note that increasing the
magnification also limits the amount of the page that is visible on the screen. It is usually better to set the
default magnification low enough to make the letters legible, while showing as much of the page as
possible.
SEARCHING FOR INFORMATION
One of the great benefits of electronic publications is the enhanced capability for locating information by
searching for words and phrases occurring anywhere in the publication. Here are some things to keep in
mind as you start using this powerful capability.

What is the difference between a Search and a Find?

One confusing aspect of the Adobe Acrobat publication viewer is that there are two ways to look for
information in your publication. These two methods are called "Search" (on the tool bar this is the button
that has the binoculars with a page behind them) and "Find" (the binoculars alone). "Search" looks for the
search criteria in all documents, whereas "Find" looks for only one word in the open document. ("Find" is
actually a holdover from earlier versions of Acrobat.) PEH on CD-ROM takes full advantage of the
"Search" capability and therefore you should make this your method of looking for information.
Tips for locating information using Search
Any search is started by pressing the "Search" button on the tool bar (the button that has the binoculars
with a page behind them . . . NOT the binoculars alone). You will see the Adobe Acrobat Search dialog
box. Use the Find Results Containing Text box to search the full text. Just type in the word or phrase
that you want to find. In addition, you can search for several words or phrases at a time by placing the
word "and" between the items you wish to locate. For example, typing hematoma formation and
cockatoo would find occurrences of both the phrase hematoma formation and the word cockatoo
throughout the journal.
To return to your search list, click on the Search List icon (the icon with the 3/4 blackened circle over a
page, located to the right of the icon that has the binoculars with a page behind them).
There is a special Online guide to help you learn how to Search:
Windows:

Start the journal and select Help > Plug-In Help > Using Acrobat Search from
the menu.

Macintosh:

Start the journal and select File > Open from the menu. Make certain that you
are in the Adobe Acrobat folder that is on your hard drive. Select the Help
folder and click on Help-Search.pdf.

Searching with wild-card characters

You can also use wild-card characters to find all the words that contain a word fragment or all the words
and terms that match an arbitrary character pattern. The wild-card characters are:
*

the asterisk, which matches zero, one, or more characters

the question mark, which matches any one character

Wild-card examples
geo*

matches words such as geode, geodesic, and Geoffrey

*nym

matches words such as antonym, homonym, and synonym

?ight

matches words such as fight, light, might, right, and sight

555-????

matches all seven-digit phone numbers with the 555 prefix

pr?m*

matches words such as premature, prim, primate, and promontory

Searching within fields

Fields available for searching are:
Field Name
Title
Author

Contents
Chapter title
Author

To search by field, type the field name followed by a tilde (~) and the search word(s) in the Find Results
Containing Text rectangle. For example, to search for electrical in the title field, type:
title~electrical
To save having to type the field name for the title and author fields, you may turn on display of the field
boxes using File > Preferences > Search... from the Acrobat menu bar. Use Show Fields to display the
field boxes. To repeat the example title search, you need enter only the word electrical in the Title box.
"Proximity" searches
Proximity, in this case, means that you will find the one location in the document where the words you
are looking for fall closest together. If there is more than one location where the words are the same
distance apart, the search will only display the first such location. Therefore, when the Proximity option is
selected, you will never see more than one match of the words used in the document. Since this is
seldom the desired result, we recommend that you do not use the Proximity option when "Searching" for
information in PEH on CD-ROM.
VIEWING RESULTS OF SEARCHES BY WORD INSTEAD OF PAGE
To ensure you see all the occurrences of your search word, you may want to change the way the articles
are displayed on the screen. The default is to display the results by "page", but you can change this
option to display by "word". To change the Adobe Acrobat search preferences, select File > Preferences
> Search... from the Adobe Acrobat menu bar. On the Adobe Search Preferences dialog there is a
Highlight box which allows you to choose a display option. By default the Display option is set to "By
Page". Change this option to "By Word".
TROUBLESHOOTING
Photographs and illustrations display poorly
PEH on CD-ROM contains high-quality photographs and illustrations. Depending on the quality of your
computer monitor, you should see good to exceptional renditions of these pages. If the display quality of
photographs is poor, first make sure that your viewing magnification is at or near 100%. You can set the
viewing magnification by choosing View from the Menu bar and selecting "Zoom To" from the menu list
or by pressing the Magnification button in the status on the bottom of the window.
You also should check the File > Preferences > General... setting for Smooth Text and Monochrome
Images. Try changing this option to improve display.
If these changes do not help the problem, the next step is to change the display drivers that control the
quality of the display. To change the display drivers, follow the appropriate instructions for your system:

Microsoft Windows
Run the Windows Setup application in the Main group.
Choose options from the menu bar and select Change System Settings from the menu list
(remember to write down the current display information in case you need to replace it later).
Press the down arrow button on the right edge of the Display box and select a display driver capable
of displaying as many colors as possible. Click OK and allow Windows Setup to save to new
information and restart Windows.
If you select a driver that will not work with your computer system, Windows may not be able to
restart. In this case you can go to DOS and type CD \WINDOWS followed by SETUP to replace the
display driver with either the original driver or another one.
Macintosh
Choose the Apple selection from the menu bar and select Control Panels from the menu list.
Select Monitors from the window.
From the Monitors dialog box, choose the option which displays the most colors (such as Millions of
Colors) for the display under characteristics of selected monitor.
Click OK and allow your system to restart using the new driver.
Search does not seem to find any words in the publication
When you start PEH on CD-ROM using the Welcome screen, Acrobat automatically attempts to add the
Petroleum Engineering Handbook index on to the list of publications that are searched. If there is a
problem setting the index, or if this index gets removed from the list, you can add it back into the list of
publications to search by following these steps:
Press the "Search" button on the tool bar (the button that has the binoculars with a page behind
them--not the binoculars alone).
From the Adobe Acrobat Search dialog box, press the Indexes button.
If Petroleum Engineering Handbook is not present in the list, click the Add button and select the
PEH.PDX file from the PDFS directory/folder on the CD.
My computer system is so slow that displaying pictures takes forever
If your computer system is too slow to comfortably display pictures, you can turn off the default display of
pictures and then turn on the pictures just when you need them. You can turn off the display of pictures
by choosing File > Preferences > General... from the Acrobat menu bar. From the General Preferences
box, click on the Display Large Images selection box to remove the check from the box and then click
OK. Simply repeat this process and replace the check in the Display Large Images selection box to turn
pictures back on.
The search is slow
The PEH on CD-ROM product was designed for optimum speed of searches. Searches should take
between 10 and 30 seconds depending on the number of articles found. The more articles there are to
find (based on the search criteria) the longer the search will take. However, the speed with which you find
the list of articles as a result of your search will vary depending on your CD-ROM drive; a quad speed
CD-ROM drive is the recommended minimum for optimum speed of searches.