I specialize in research manuscripts, which I edit in MS Word. However, once a year, I perform a very different kind of editing.

I edit sales catalogs for a teak furniture company for which a friend of mine works.

You might think I edit all the text in the catalog in a Word document, but that is not the case at all. There are many things that are very different when editing one of this company’s catalogs.

The editing is done on PDFs using Adobe Acrobat. In order to do this, I peruse each page and place a comment icon wherever I see an error or other issue. When I do this, a comment list pops up in a narrow pane on the right side of the screen, and my comment appears there while I am writing it. When I have finished, I click the save icon. (I save the PDF after every comment I make, because I am very paranoid about losing my work.)

My editing these catalogs consist of editing the text, verifying the SKU number and dimensions of each furniture item, and verifying each item’s price. This means that I must have the PDF, the company’s website, and an Excel pricing spreadsheet open on my PC and constantly click back and forth between the three of them. This can get very confusing and can test my attention span, but I have become skilled at doing this. After all, I have been editing this company’s sales catalogs since its 2020 edition.

Distraction is my biggest challenge when editing the catalogs. The large photos of the products are absolutely gorgeous—chaises by a swimming pool of aqua-blue water, friendly-looking Adirondack chairs placed in a circle around a fire pit in a beautiful backyard—you can imagine. I sometimes find myself admiring the scenery and thinking, “If I win the lottery, that will be my swimming pool,” or “I would absolutely love for that to be my patio.” Then I quickly smack myself in the figurative face and think, “Okay, we have editing to do.”

Editors, do you do any work in Acrobat? If so, what do you edit?