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The Wonderful World of PDFs! Hello, and welcome to another Warehouse! This month, I'll be talking about PDF documents, but first, I want to point out a couple links that were sent to me by readers. The first is a list of free software with some flavor text added by the site's author. It's called Freebies Galore! The site has links to lots of useful and totally free things, including the version of Word Perfect that I am using to type this. The other site is called HyperArchive, and it is actually a front-end for the Info/Mac Archive that MIT maintains. There is a lot of stuff here and it's in a pretty crude format, but it is broken into categories and sorted by name or date. Many thanks to both of my readers for pointing these out to me. If anybody else reads this column and knows of a good shareware or freeware site, you're more than welcome to let me know.
One More Thing... OK, to delay talking about PDF documents even longer, I want to mention a site that will be useful to anybody who plays games or might want to try one out. The site is macgamefiles.com, and, as the name implies, you can download Mac game files there. The site contains updates and add-ons for games you may already own and demos you can download and play. One of the coolest features is that people can rate the demos and leave their comments and opinions on the site for others to read. That is helpful for sorting the gems from the junk. I think Majesty and Heroes III Complete are two of the most interesting and fun demos released recently. Of course, by the time you read this, they'll both be really old.
That PDF Thing OK, I'll quit stalling and making vague references. It's time to talk about PDF documents. I'll begin with a little story that I hope you'll find to be relevant by the time you finish reading this month's column.[Editor's Note: So do I ;)] Jane Doe, a recent college graduate, has a degree in complex brainy things that most people wouldn't understand. So, of course, Jane is looking for a job where she'll be doing complex brainy things that most people wouldn't understand -- so she decided that a résumé is in order. After spending many hours using Microsoft Word, Jane made the perfect résumé that highlighted all of the complex brainy things she understands. It was time for Jane to show her résumé to potential employers, so she mailed it to various companies that deal in complex brainy things. Jane also made a website and put her résumé there. She had an HTML version that people could view, and also made a download link for a copy of the original Microsoft Word document. Unfortunately, the HTML version of the résumé doesn't have the same spacing as the original, and it appears different to different people depending on their web browser and screen settings. Also, not everybody who went to her website owned Microsoft Word, so they couldn't download the Word version.
Jane was frustrated by this, but fortunately she knew about PDFs! (Don't worry, they're not a complex brainy thing.) Using software that I'll talk about hopefully by the end of this column, Jane made a PDF version of her résumé. Not only can everybody view the PDF version of her résumé, but it will also look very similar to the original Word document, and won't change in appearance on different browsers.
How Can You View a PDF? The most common PDF reader is Adobe Acrobat Reader, and it lets you open and view PDF documents. It will usually install plug-ins for your web browser as well. The best thing is, you may already have Acrobat Reader installed on your computer. If you're not sure if you do or not, click here. If you see some crazy page describing a homework assignment I was working on a couple months ago, then you already have Acrobat Reader installed. If you didn't see anything like that, you probably don't have Acrobat Reader installed. In that case, you need to go to Adobe and download it, but it is freeware so it never costs anything.
That Looks Nice, But How Do I Make One? Good question. If you followed the link to Adobe's page, you would have seen that a program called Adobe Acrobat 4.0 can make PDF files. You also would have seen that it costs $249.00. I don't want to spend $249.00. Do you want to spend $249.00? I didn't think so. Fortunately, you're reading a column about shareware and freeware, so I'm going to show you the inexpensive way to make PDF documents. Go to versiontracker and search for PrintToPDF. PrintToPDF is a neat little program that will make PDF files from anything that can normally be printed. It works by fooling your computer into thinking it's a printer, but instead of printing to paper, it saves a PDF on your hard drive. Activating PrintToPDF is as simple as selecting Print from the File menu. Installation was very easy, and it just involved dragging the PrintToPDF icon into the system folder. After that, I was able to select PrintToPDF from the Chooser, and it worked without even restarting.
Overall, PrintToPDF is very useful. You could use it to take any file from any word processor, convert it to PDF, and view or print it on any other computer, regardless of the OS or word processor. PrintToPDF does have its flaws though. The font collection included is rather limited, so if the document you are converting is using a font that PrintToPDF does not have, PrintToPDF will try to use something similar with mixed results. PrintToPDF is not freeware either, for there is a $20 registration fee. The trial period seems to be unlimited though.
Last Words I find PDFs useful because I use a Mac laptop in a building full of Windows computers, and I don't have the software to connect to the network printer. However, I can make a PDF and print it on one of the Windows machines if I need a paper copy of a document. The fact that PDFs are small and can be viewed with most web browsers makes them the most ideal and compact way to save documents. As a matter of fact, PDFs are so ideal that Microsoft removed the option of saving to PDF out of Microsoft Word a few versions back, because they realized that people wouldn't need to spend $400 on Office to view Word documents if people were saving them as PDF. PDF is actually an open-standard that anybody can get access to, so there are many PDF utilities available that create and edit PDF files. (Just look on any shareware site and you'll see what I mean.) There is a lot of potential here, but they haven't taken off yet because PDFs are a threat to the expensive and proprietary word processors that dominate the market. I just thought I'd let you know, because they won't tell you. That's it for this month. Until next time, stay warm, brush your teeth, and feel free to email me if you have anything to say that is at least slightly relevant to anything I've ever written.
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