The Portable Document Format, which you know simply as PDF, is in fact a very good format for documents mainly due to four facts:

1. They’re usually significantly smaller compared to a DOC (especially if there are images within).
2. They look exactly the same no matter what OS you use.
3. It is true WYSIWYG concerning printers. What you see on screen is precisely what will print out on paper.
4. The likelihood of a PDF containing a virus and/or malicious scripting is slim to none. Not impossible, but highly unlikely.

Before getting into SumatraPDF and why I think it’s the best PDF viewer ever, here’s an explanation of why we hate PDF.

What we hate about PDFs aren’t the files themselves, but the reader applications.

I wholly believe that Adobe Reader is evil. Very evil. Why? Well, first of all it’s a 26MB installer file. For a document reader? Yes. What’s in that 26MB? A whole lot of crap you don’t need.

The crapola starts even before you download the file. You specifically have to uncheck a box so you don’t download the "Free McAfee Security Scan."

The Adobe Reader installer as far as I’m concerned tries every way to hijack your web browser by installing a ton of useless garbage. You have to go through the installation procedure very s-l-o-w-l-y, else it will put install a plugin in all your browsers. What happens after that is that on any attempt to load a PDF from a web page, all this CRAP loads up from Adobe Reader asking you a whole bunch of questions on first run, and worst of all loads the PDF directly in the browser. This absolutely scares the daylights out of people because they think the browser is crashing due to the fact Reader is so bloated, huge and takes forever even to get started. And in some instances the browser does crash because of Adobe Reader.

Adobe Reader is evil. Period.

The significantly smaller FoxIt Reader was a good alternative. But now it has promotional banner graphics inside the reader. Evil. And it tries to do the same browser hijack crap Adobe Reader does. Eeeevil. And you now have to very s-l-o-w-l-y go through the installation process just like with Adobe to make sure a bunch of crap (like, oh, I dunno, a useless toolbar) doesn’t get installed. Eeeeeeeeeevil.

FoxIt Reader is now also evil. Sad but true.

Going PDF reader-less

I hated PDF readers so much that I simply uninstalled them and used Google Docs to read my PDF files. That system reads them easily – but with one huge drawback: It’s not the easiest thing in the world to print a PDF out of Google Docs. You’re better off printing direct from a PDF document reader.

Enter SumatraPDF

SumatraPDF has an installer that is only 1.4MB in size. It is free and open source. It does not have any stupid toolbar installers in it. It does not try to hijack your web browsers. The only thing it will ask you is if you want it to be the default reader for PDF files – that’s it.

It is wonderful. All I ever wanted was to just view the PDFs I download, and that’s exactly what SumatraPDF does with no fuss whatsoever.

Can SumatraPDF read all PDF files? Mostly. The only ones it would have a problem with are the super-advanced type with intricate fill-in forms and whatnot. But other than that it will happily read just about any PDF file you load into it.

Example: Let’s say you downloaded Form W-4 from the IRS, which happens to be a PDF:

http://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/fw4.pdf

In SumatraPDF:

Loads perfectly. Prints perfectly. And that’s all you ever want out of a PDF document reader.

The only thing you ever hated about PDF files were the readers needed to view them. But after using SumatraPDF, you’ll happily dump FoxIt and Adobe to the curb.

SumatraPDF is the best PDF viewer ever because it opens PDF files with zero hassle and does so lightning quick; that’s why it’s the best (on Windows).

People save web pages to ensure they can retrieve information later without having to load it on the internet. It also is a way of retrieving a web page just in case the original web site has an outage or goes offline for whatever reason.

There are two basic ways of saving web pages, that being via the browser or "printing it" to a PDF.

Via the browser

The browser that has the absolute best web page save feature is Internet Explorer 8, due to the fact it can save entire web pages as a "Web Archive." When you click File/Save As (if you don’t see that in your IE 8, press ALT on your keyboard to bring up that menu,) you’ll see it as a save option:

When you choose to save it will "crunch" everything into a single file:

Why is this the best? Because it’s a single file that contains everything (and that’s why it’s labeled as an archive.) All the text, all the images and everything included. If you load it afterward, it looks exactly the way it was originally. It is to the best of my knowledge the only browser that does it right.

Other browsers, such as Firefox, save as "Web page, complete" and it’s nothing but a huge mess. An HTML file will be saved which is the web page, but a subfolder will also be created with all the images, JavaScript files, etc. You can literally get 20+ files out of a single web page save.

Love or hate IE 8, it rules the roost when it comes to web page archiving.

Drawbacks:

• Only one – it’s proprietary to IE 8. Otherwise it’s the best way to archive a web page.

Via PDF Creator

If you don’t use IE 8 and want a web to save web pages a single files that include images and so on, the best way to do this is to use PDF Creator to create PDF files. This is free software that will install a virtual print driver and can be used in your web browser of choice.

Once installed, go to any web page, load it, then click File/Print or press CTRL+P. 

Choose PDF Creator from the window that appears:

..click OK.

The page will be crunched and made ready for PDF rendering:

You’ll see this:

Click the Save button at bottom right. You’ll be asked to name the file and where you want to save it to. Once done, the page is archived as a PDF.

Drawbacks:

• Many times the PDF creator will default to a serif font (Times New Roman) instead of the font seen on the original web page.
• Any links in the web page will not work in the PDF.

These drawbacks are usually acceptable being it’s the text you care about the most when it comes to a web page. Any images on the page will be embedded in the PDF; all text is searchable as well.

In addition, the PDF created even for very large web pages will be small in file size, suitable for sending in email if you want to send it off to a friend.

Via ScreenGrab

This is for Firefox only.

ScreenGrab is a FireFox plugin. It allows you to save a PNG or JPEG screen shot of any web page, but does so far better than ALT+PrintScreen. ScreenGrab will take an image of the entire page including the full length. The screen shot taken will look identical to what you see on-screen.

Drawbacks:

• Since the output file is an image, none of the text can be searched and links won’t work either.
• The default output file is a PNG. If the web page you save is very long, the file saved will be enormous.
• On very large web pages it can cause Firefox to freeze up when attempting to take a full screen shot, particularly on slower computers.

You can make the screen shot ScreenGrab takes to be smaller by purposely not using the browser maximized, because yes, ScreenGrab captures everything – including all the white space on the sides.

To use ScreenGrab, install the add-on, then on any web page, right-click and choose ScreenGrab:

"Complete Page/Frame" will save the entire page, length and all.

"Visible portion" only captures what the browser is displaying at that moment.

"Selection" allows you to select what you want captured.

"Window" acts like ALT+PrintScreen does.

Choosing to Save will save the file. Choosing to Copy will copy the image to the clipboard buffer where you can paste into another program such as an image editor, Word, etc.

I have posted about several tools to create PDF files, so today here is a tool to help you manipulate them. PDF Split and Merge is an open source program which does exactly as its name says:

• split your pdf documents (into chapters, single pages, etc.).
• merge many pdf documents or subsections of them.
• extract sections of your document into a single pdf document.
• mix alternate pages taken from two pdf documents in straight or reverse order into a single document.
• rotate pages of the selected pdf documents.
• visually reorder pages of a selected pdf document.
• visually compose a document dragging pages from selected pdf documents.

The program comes in both a basic and enhanced version. This tool in combination with a PDF creator for the most part should accommodate virtually all of your PDF needs.

It seems like in the past couple of weeks a lot of security risks are popping up. So to add to the list, I read about a critical security risk with Adobe Reader versions 8.1.2 and lower (this exploit is not applicable to version 9). The vunerability comes from the use of JavaScript inside the PDF file:

Engineers from CoreLabs determined that Adobe Reader could be exploited to gain access to vulnerable systems via the use of a specially crafted PDF file with malicious JavaScript content.

My first thought is why does a PDF document even need JavaScript? I seriously cannot think of a single reason a PDF document would need this ability. Perhaps I have opened PDF’s in the past which had JavaScript in them and I didn’t know it, but overall I just use a PDF reader to open “static” documents.

To avoid issues such as this, just use a ’simple’ PDF viewer, such as Foxit Reader which is not effected by this exploit. If you do need the additional functionality of Adobe however, just make sure you keep it updated.

A feature of the OpenOffice Writer word processing application is the ability to easily export a document as a PDF. This is built-in to the software.

There may be times you will want to set security permission on the exported PDF to prevent printing or modification of the document itself (such as when sending contract agreements to clients where the document absolutely must not be modified in any way).

OpenOffice makes this easy to do by performing the following steps:

Click File then Export as PDF.

NOTE: Clicking the PDF button in the top button bar will only export "simple" PDF documents with no options. You must click File then Export as PDF to get the options you want.

In the PDF Options dialog box, click the Security tab.

Looks like this:

From here you can set all the options you require. More often than not the only ones you will be interested in are Not Permitted either under "Printing" or "Changes".

Once these options are set, click the Export button at the bottom. You will be prompted to save the PDF file. Save it, and you’re done.

Recently I had to reinstall Windows XP on my laptop and had to view a PDF but didn’t feel like installing the Adobe software. As most people know, the PDF viewer from Adobe is huge, clunky in operation and a huge memory sucker. Furthermore the modern variant of the software does that "view inside the browser" crapola which is extremely annoying.

Note before continuing: Yes I know I could have downloaded and used the Foxit Reader, but all I wanted to do was view a PDF with no fuss, no muss.

I thought to myself "There must be some way to view a PDF online without installing any software."

The first option is to use Google Docs. But they only allow a maximum filesize of 500k. Boooooo.. not good. They offer 7 gigs of e-mail storage but won’t load a document over 500k in Google Docs? Ridiculous.

Then I finally found what I was looking for. It’s simply titled Online viewer for PDF, PostScript and Word. NO software to be installed. NO registration required. Upload the file (or enter the URL of where it is) and you’re good to go.

To note: Yes it looks a bit "ugly", but who cares? You can load PDFs and read them and that’s the whole point.

I hope that site stays online forever. It’s simple and lightning fast – the way it should be.

One of the easiest ways to make money on the internet is to write electronic documents (i.e. a PDFs) and post them for sale. These documents could be about whatever you know. They can be short or long but longer is obviously better.

However you don’t want to put a whole bunch of time and effort into writing something only to get a few sales and nothing more. You want continuous revenue, as in the kind that keeps on coming and isn’t just flash-in-the-pan style.

This article will outline what you need to do so the documents/books you publish keep bringing in the cash.

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I made an interesting discovery today when I was exporting some Word Documents to PDF. I had previously been using the PDF printer installed on my machine (CutePDF), but this time I used the Microsoft Save add-in to save the document as a PDF.

I found the Microsoft add-in worked much better. Not only was the file saved to PDF faster, but the file size was smaller and my links within the Word Document carried over to the PDF. By ‘links within’ I am referring not only to external URL links, but my table of contents. As you know, in Word when you generate a table of contents, you can click on the item and jump to the applicable section in the Word Document. By using the MS add-in, this exact functionality existed in the output PDF.

Unfortunately, the free Microsoft add-in is only available for Office 2007, but 2007 users should definitely take advantage.

Some have found Adobe Reader to be annoying, bloated, and just a plain pain in the rear. There are alternatives like FoxIt, but if you want to abolish PDF readers all together and still be able to look at the occasional PDF, here’s a nifty service called PDFMENOT.

This service allows you to either view PDFs that are linked somewhere on the web, or upload a PDF from your computer. While this service does fine with standard text and image PDFs, you may run into issues with highly interactive PDFs.