Comments on: Working With PDFs

By: Henrich Wenzel

Henrich Wenzel — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 22:59:19 +0000

Robert, you could try Papyrus http://www.rom-logicware.com/ . This editor is capable of storing a hybrid pdf that is recognized as a ‘normal’ pdf file by other programms but still editable by Papyrus.

By: Robert R. Holt

Robert R. Holt — Sun, 10 Aug 2008 01:20:21 +0000

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?

By: theologien

theologien — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 19:30:38 +0000

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

By: Mauricio Argote

Mauricio Argote — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 19:30:26 +0000

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.

By: Christopher Chulak

Christopher Chulak — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 23:18:50 +0000

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.

By: Curt Fiedler

Curt Fiedler — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:09:30 +0000

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.

By: Curt Fiedler

Curt Fiedler — Thu, 02 Aug 2007 17:04:03 +0000

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.

By: John Calvert

John Calvert — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 20:43:24 +0000

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.

By: Tony

Tony — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 17:01:11 +0000

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/

By: Dealing with PDFs: Organizing, Manipulating, Converting « Life of a Pre-Med

Dealing with PDFs: Organizing, Manipulating, Converting « Life of a Pre-Med — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 14:22:09 +0000

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