Tech Tutor Mark

I had heard that you could have Adobe Reader read a PDF to you, but I had not tried it until today.  The Read Out Loud feature reads aloud the text in a PDF document, including the text in comments and alternate text descriptions for images and fillable fields.  It uses the available voices installed on your system.  These voices may have been installed from text-to-speech or language applications, and you can choose them to read your PDFs by going to Edit>>Preferences .  Here you can stick with the default voice, or pick one of remaining voices.  You can also control pitch and speed settings directly below the voice choice.  This article published online by Adobe takes you through the steps .  After activating Read Out Loud, don't forget to go back to the View menu and click on  Read Out Loud again, and choose whether you want it to read the entire document, or just the rest of the text left on the page. 

One of the most entertaining and informative technology trainers working today is Leslie Fisher. If you have not seen one of her one-hour sessions at Michigan's MACUL conference, or any other tech conference for that matter, then you really should seek her out. And if you don't get a chance to see her perform, then you can stop by her Web site: http://www.lesliefisher.com/ Leslie is truly one of the most engaging tech people wandering around the planet today, and she really knows her stuff. She is one of those rare people who could be considered an expert in her field. Specializing in training sessions on Adobe and Apple products, she has gained quite a following as a speaker, after appearing in some of the bigger tech conferences in the country. Her dynamic sessions for the past several years on the capabilities of Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional have been a great draw at MACUL . Here is the page where you can download her handout from that session: http://www.lesliefisher.com/...

If you're looking for the online how-to magazine for everything Adobe, here is the site: http://www.layersmagazine.com/ . Every day, you will find reviews, contests, a blog, articles and Creative Suite tutorials added to the site. Just click on the program you want, such as Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash, AfterEffects, Dreamweaver, etc. There are icons at the top for each of the big Adobe applications. Clicking on any one of them will bring up tips and tutorials for that program. For a more comprehensive collection of tutorials, click on either the " Tutorials " link on the top navigation bar, or click on the "Tutorial Center" link at the very top of the site. You can subscribe to the site (to obtain the latest updates) by clicking on the RSS feed link on any page. There is a tremendous amount of free content on this site, but if you prefer to subscribe to the newsstand magazine subscription, a one-year subscription costs $30.00 or $50.00 for two years. The full ...

Photoshop Now Online...Sort of What if I told you that Adobe Photoshop was now available for free? Would you be interested? Would you be skeptical? After all, Adobe Photoshop Elements 6.0 costs around $99 in stores (slightly cheaper at Sam's Club), and the full-blown professional-level Photoshop CS3 costs over $600 retail. It is available for free? From what software bootlegger? I'm sure all of this is going through your mind. Well, it is free...sort of. Remember some years ago when Adobe was bundling a product called Photoshop Album for free with digital cameras and some scanners? Then it was replaced by Photoshop Elements, which now includes a new and improved photo organizer. All of this you have to pay for. Wouldn't it be nice to have some of these Adobe photo features for free on the Web? That is sort of the idea here. Adobe wants to compete with Google and Shutterfly, Kodak and Snapfish, flickr and picnik.com , all of which are Web-based services. You see, more and m...