A tip for Adobe users...

After gaining hard-won knowledge on how Adobe products work from the Usual Sources (i.e., any place other than Adobe), make a record of the solution, because it is not beyond possibility that Adobe will reconfigure itself to behave in a manner other than what you prefer.

Case in point: A while ago, I puzzled over the fact that when Microsoft Word was instructed to print a document to PDF using the Letter paper format, the result shown in Acrobat was formatted for A4.

It turns out you have to go into Printers, select Adobe, open the Preferences, and specify Letter.

There didn't seem to be anything in particular one was supposed to do to keep it that way, but when I again, a few minutes ago, experienced the same unwelcome behavior (creation of an A4 format), it took me hardly any time at all to go and change the configuration again, because I had made a note of the problem (I have an entire section devoted to Adobe) and its solution.

Heck, I feel so good about this, it's almost as it it worked the way it should in the first place!

It was a day...

It was a day for taking a good, long walk without a dog. And so I did just that, with a long stroll down to the Jack-in-the-Box and back, which added just over 3 miles to my mental odometer. The air was pleasantly crisp when I set out, wearing a tee and an overshirt; but warm enough to shed the overshirt by the time I was halfway back.

* * *I finally got around to invoicing some late February items. One was a document in which my invoice is based on, among other things, the number of new words added as a result of revisions made to the old document. Short of going through such a document by hand and counting each individual group of new words, there is no convenient way to figure this out.

A tactic that used to work (but which does not seem to work anymore) was to do a search and replace for words exhibiting a certain format characteristic, such as color. But this afternoon, when I highlighted added text and clicked on the Font Color dropdown box, the color shown was "Automatic," which happens to also be the color of the normal text in the document. When I highlighted some deleted text (which is shown struck through) and examined the font characteristics of the highlighted section, it not only also displays an "Automatic" font color, but the "Strikethrough" effect is tellingly not checked.

It's almost as if someone, somewhere made the conscious decision to restrict what you could do with such text to accepting the change it represents, rejecting the change, or highlighting the previous or next instance.

And so, keeping a positive attitude in mind (I'm positive I'd like to give the designers a piece of my mind), I did the count by hand (clicking on Next, and then Deleting whatever was highlighted as a result). Since then, I've found some online code that purports to count added and deleted text, but it appears to have a unique approach to counting words (e.g., when the VB code finishes chewing on

, Law 386-FZ of December 23, 2010

it reports 10 words are present. Go figure.

* * *Galina is downstairs, "watching millionaires present each other with gold statues," as Billy Crystal quipped a couple of years ago while hosting the Oscars. I might go downstairs and join her for a little bit, before retiring for the night.

Cheers...