As you know now, we are huge fans of the Apple Touch Bar, once customized with BetterTouchTool.
So we thought that a Touch Bar, specifically developed for callas pdfToolbox, a very powerful PDF tool, but whose functions are sometimes a little hidden and with few keyboard shortcuts, would be a great help to improve your productivity.
The pdfToolbox Touch Bar in action
We use this Touch Bar for a few days now, and cannot work without it anymore!
We hope that it will be as useful to you as it is to us.
Main Touch Bar
This strip provides quick direct access to many pdfToolbox features. For others, as many options are available, we chose to create “sub-strips” with the different possible settings.
- Link to this help page
- Show/hide Switchboard
- Show/hide Profile panel
- Show/hide Checks panel
- Show/hide Fixups panel
- Open the Metadata Explorer*
- Open the Layer Explorer**
- Object Inspector control strip
- Separations control strip
- Image control strip
- Ink coverage control strip
- Output preview
- Done: close the currently opened panel (on the right)
* Unlike the other panels, the button displays the Metadata Explorer, but you have to close the panel using the close box. The reason is that you can open multiple panels pointing to different objects or using different layout to display metadata.
** As above, the button shows but does not hide the Layers Explorer. However, it will open only once (it would certainly be better to have a panel show/hide on each key press).
Note that these behaviors are the same with the use of menus or keyboard shortcuts, it has nothing to do with our Touch Bar.
Object Inspector
This control strip offers the different options to inspect objects.
- Show/hide wireframe
- Show/hide text objects
- Show/hide vector objects
- Show/hide shadings
- Show/hide images
- Back: close the control strip
- Done: close the control strip and the object inspector
Separations Visualizer
This control strip gives access to the different separation visualization modes.
- Process Separations
- Spot Color Separations
- Individual Separations
- Back: close the control strip
- Done: close the control strip and the separation visualizer
Process Separations
This control strip drives the process separation visualizer options.
- Show CMY separations
- Show black separation
- Show CMYK separations
- Back: close the control strip and go back to the separations mode selection
- Done: close the control strip and the separation visualizer
Spot Color Separations
This control strip drives the spot color separation visualizer options.
- Show spot colors only
- Show spot colors and black
- Show CMYK only
- Back: close the control strip and go back to the separations mode selection
- Done: close the control strip and the separation visualizer
Individual Separations
This control strip drives the individual separation visualizer options.
- Cyan
- Magenta
- Yellow
- Black
- Spot 1*
- Spot 2*
- Spot 3*
- Spot 4*
- Back: close the control strip and go back to the separations mode selection
- Done: close the control strip and the separation visualizer
*Be careful, as our Touch Bar is globally designed for the pdfToolbox application, it does not take into account the exact content of your files (this would require to be a developed feature in pdfToolbox).
By default, it offers 4 spot colors, but if your file counts less, the buttons may have unexpected behaviors, such as selecting the regular page view for example.
Image resolution visualizer
This control strip offers settings to check the resolution of the images.
- Resolution: 72 dpi
- Resolution: 96 dpi
- Resolution: 150 dpi
- Resolution: 225 dpi
- Resolution: 300 dpi
- Resolution: custom value – touch the button and enter your value
- Back: close the control strip
- Done: close the control strip and the image resolution panel
Ink coverage visualizer
This control strip offers the different settings for ink coverage visualizer.
Be aware that to be able to use the value buttons, it is necessary to be in “Highlight” view mode, which is the default mode. However, if you have selected the topographic view mode before, you must touch the “Highlight” button before choosing a value button.
- Topographic view mode
- Highlight view mode
- Ink coverage: 260
- Ink coverage: 280
- Ink coverage: 300
- Ink coverage: 320
- Ink coverage: custom value – touch the button and enter your value
- Back: close the control strip
- Done: close the control strip and the ink coverage panel
Download
Menu item names differ between the languages available for the application, so we have created 2 separate Touch Bars for English and French.
Download and install the one that corresponds to the language of your application.
Try this Touch Bar and tell us if you find it helpful. Feel free to post your comments, remarks or requests below!
