Working With PDFs
It seems that more and more I find myself wanting to manipulate/work with PDFs. I generally only accept work from students that is in PDF or RTF form, many of the articles I download are formatted as PDFs, even many users manuals are PDFs. So here are some tips/tools for managing PDFs:
Organizing PDFs: This one is easy. Any journal article etc. that I download as a PDF for future use I send straight to Devon Think. There are of course other choices, like Yojimbo and Yep. (Yep seems to be a good alternative to the brain in a box programs like Devon and Yojimbo, as it is simply meant to organize documents—worth a try if you are not already using one of the other applications.) (Sorry these are Mac only)
Manipulating PDFs: Many times I get a PDF that I want to split, or the reverse two separate ones that I want to combine into one. You can also use this to chop up a longer pdf and just save the small part that you want (like just one journal article as opposed to the whole thing.) My program of choice for this is PDFLab. PDFLab can be buggy, I have had it crash while I was working with it, but it is more powerful than a few of the other similar programs (I have never had it loose or “eat” a file, just had to restart the program.) If you don’t like PDFLab you can always give Combine PDFs. These are both Mac only applications, but if you need a PC version try PDF Split and Merge. Also you can use Foxit Page Organizer this is a more advanced version of their free Windows software program—Foxit Reader.
Converting to PDF: If you have a file you need to convert from another format to a PDF this can also be done relatively easy (say you have a Word document you need to be a PDF). If you have a Mac all you need to do is open the file and select Print. Now rather than hitting return to print the document select the button in the bottom left of the pop-up window called “PDF” and select “Save as PDF.” But what if you have a PC or a file your Mac cannot open and want to convert it to a pdf. No worries there are online tools which will convert most file formats into a pdf. I have use PDF Online although there are several others (as a side note this is also a good way to handle a microsoft windows document which you cannot open (say you don’t own microsoft, or have an olde version and someone sends you a new file). This is a good resource to show students so they can always send you their assignments in the proper format.
July 23rd, 2007 at 6:27 am
What about Acrobat Professional for manipulating PDFs? It combines the features of all those programs you mentioned — and adds many more. I know the retail price makes it prohibitively expensive, but most students can get the academic version from their campus computer store for around $80, which is a good deal for what it does. I find new uses for it all the time.
July 23rd, 2007 at 7:39 am
I would add that if you use Open Office, on any OS including Windows, you can just go to File - Export - PDF. This means you can open e.g. a Word document in Open Office, and save it as PDF.
July 23rd, 2007 at 8:17 am
You left out a great open source mac program for reading and marking up pdfs. I use Skim to mark up pdfs on my mac and have found it incredibly useful.
July 23rd, 2007 at 2:22 pm
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July 23rd, 2007 at 5:01 pm
No need to go “online” to create PDFs on a Windows machine. Use the open source pdf Creator. Works like a printer; sounds like it works similar to the Mac Only solution given in the post.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
July 23rd, 2007 at 8:43 pm
For PCs, I would also include PDF Creator. This adds a PDF printer in file>print of any application - easy and free. We have it installed on all the PCs in our district.
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:04 pm
I think I’ve mentioned before my website resource page for Windows users needing to save pdf files. You can access it here: http://sensei.ad.umuc.edu/cfiedler/other_info/saving_pdf_files_in_windows.html
If you want to install a print-driver PDF maker on your Windows PC, I would recommend doPDF over PDF Creator or CutePDF. The install is easier, and it works like a charm without adding any spam footers to your docs. You can get the links to all three of these at the link above.
For website conversions, my students found two new ones that I hadn’t. Neevia Document Converter, Doc2PDF, and Zamzar are on my list. Zamzar is the most promising, as the file size limit is 100MB, and it works with Micro$oft’s new .docx format (which I can’t open on my Mac). Again, see the link above.
I welcome other suggestions so that I may add them to my resource list. And feel free to link to it.
-GCFiedler
PS: BTW, PDF lab actually saves the smallest pdf files. The “Compress PDF” command doesn’t seem to shrink my pdf files, and often makes them larger. This is particularly true for anything I print to pdf from Word. But I found by accident that PDFLab can decrease the size of most any pdf file, even without the low res graphic option. So, I often open and save to compress pdf files with that app.
August 2nd, 2007 at 5:09 pm
Another couple of comments.
$80 is more than my students will pay for, so Acrobat won’t cut it. They want FREE when I’m asking them to submit papers in pdf format.
I like SKIM, but it has problems saving some pdf files - it seems to change letter spacing, making nonintelligible text when you print to pdf in the app to make annotations visible to any pdf reader.
August 3rd, 2007 at 11:18 pm
Had real CRASH problems with PDFlab. Luckily the snapscan I got along with my DEVONthink came with Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Standard. Simple extraction is a few clicks away. And I REALLY need to extract as DEVONthink will only OCR 50 pages at a time due to licensing stuff.
August 7th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
Try also this option for PDF administration/storage/view: PAPERS (http://mekentosj.com/papers/). It’s very promising… Better yet, it’s tailored for research and academic people, and with an active forum.
October 18th, 2007 at 7:30 pm
CutePDF acts as a printer, so that when you go to print a word doc., webpage, et. al., you hit print, choose cutePDF, and it asks where you want to save the file.
Works great, never had a problem with it
August 10th, 2008 at 1:20 am
I have written a book in PDF, to be published on a CD (to be enclosed in vol. 1 of the work), but it needs revision; the publisher I was working with held it for years before giving up, so updates are necessary. I wrote it using Acrobat Professional several years ago; my version is now obsolete. I’m looking for an inexpensive software package that will enable me to make edits on pdf pages. I originally wrote in Word and converted, and can if necessary do that again, but it was a big hassle to assemble the 20 separate PDF docs. into one and burn it. Have downloaded PDFLab and Combine PDFs, which i hope will help.
Another major problem is that when i first completed the original CD, it worked beautifully with Adobe Reader (I don’t know what version, but it was 4 years ago) but badly with the current version (9). The old Search was so fast and helpful that I threw away the index I had prepared, and just advised readers to look up any topic using Search: it very quickly prepared a list of instances where the word or phrase was found, in contexts of a few words fore and aft. Then you could look them over and select the ones that interested you. Now you are simply taken to the first occasion right in the text, the word highlighted, until you do something with it, all very slowly. Also, when you used an internal link to look for further discussion of a topic, and wanted to go back to where you had been, you just needed to click the Back button. Now that takes you back one page from wherever you are. To go back, you can go to View, Go To, and the last of the choices, which takes appreciably longer and is not so easy to explain to a reader. Any ideas about how to revive the older, better system?