We fully understand that PDFs can be a little bit confusing when you first start using them. They’re pretty to look at but sometimes when you want to do some seemingly simple tasks — convert PDF to Word, copy text, etc — you can run into big problems. If you’re stuck and need an answer shoot us an email and we’ll happily try to write a post that answers your question.

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• Improved PDF Annotations: Take advantage of new PDF annotations in Preview. Add Stickies-style notes and links to websites or other pages within the PDF. Mark important areas in ovals or rectangles and highlight text. All annotations are saved with the PDF so you can share them with others.
• Relevancy Ranked PDF Search: Harness the power of Spotlight. Preview now uses Spotlight to perform relevancy ranked searches on PDF documents, making it easier to find what you’re looking for.
• PDF Manipulation in Preview: Re-create your PDF as you like. Move individual pages around, or remove pages altogether. You can even combine PDFs with a simple drag and drop.
• Preview Controls for PDFs: Gain new control over PDFs you see on the web. With Preview controls built into Safari, you can zoom in and out, navigate PDF pages with the sidebar, even open the PDF in a separate Preview window.
• New Automator Actions: Create more useful Automator workflows with actions for RSS feeds, iSight camera video snapshots, PDF manipulation, and much more.

This along with built-in PDF creation and viewing makes the PDF functionality in Mac’s fairly formidable.

Check out all 300 new features in Mac OS X Leopard.

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I’ve just finished upgrading to Gutsy Gibbon, the latest release of Ubuntu, and I am very happy to find that a PDF printer driver is now installed by default. Previously I’ve covered some PDF creators that are available for Linux operating systems and have generally found that they are lacking in both functionality and numbers (i.e. there isn’t that many of them). Hopefully now that the PDF printer is a more integrated part of Ubuntu, it will get more attention feature wise.

The PDF printer in Gutsy Gibbon is an updated version of CUPS-PDF.

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• Adobe PDF security flaw: This weeks PDF related headlines have been dominated by a recently uncovered vulnerability in Adobe Reader and Acrobat. The vulnerability was discovered by Petko Petkov, a security researcher, who seems to have a knack for discovering high profile flaws. In response, Adobe Systems have released a security advisory that provides details on how users can hack their registry to protect themselves. The vulnerability only affects machines that are using the combination of Windows XP and Internet Explorer 7. Adobe will release a patch before the end of the month that fixes this security hole.
• Designing PDF forms with OpenOffice: PDF expert and author, Ted Padova, takes a look at the the PDF forms functionality in OpenOffice over at his Acrobat Users blog.
• List PDF Bookmarks with a Free Script: Acrobat for Legal Professionals has a useful post on how to easily create a list of all bookmarks in a document.
• Change PDF Versions using Acrobat: Sometimes when you submit PDF documents you need to use a specific PDF version. This article provides you with tips on how to check what version of the PDF specification a document is using and then change it.

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It’s easy enough to create PDFs on a Windows or Mac machine, but what about Linux? A quick search of the web will show you that Linux doesn’t have half the number of PDF creator options that Windows and Macs have, not even close, in fact your options on Linux are quite limited (which is hard for me to say, since I’m a Linux fan).

You might be asking why would anyone need more than one PDF creator? The answer is simple, if there was one free PDF creator that did everything (retain links, bookmarks, indexes, tables of contents, convert entire websites, optimize output, control font embedding, add metadata, etc), then you wouldn’t need more than one, but there isn’t, so you need options.

Here are some of the options for creating PDFs on Linux:

• CUPS-PDF: This is perhaps the most well known PDF printer driver for Linux. If you are using Ubuntu then CUPS-PDF is provided as part of the distribution, you can install it by following these instructions. My main complaint is that you cannot manually specify the location that you would like to save your printed PDF to, instead the application prints all PDFs to a hard coded location (in Ubuntu it is a folder called PDF in the home directory). Also, you can only configure the PDFs paper size, color and margin, you are unable to configure settings like the desired file size/quality, etc.
• OpenOffice: With the release of version 1.1 Open Office included a export to PDF option. While this isn’t a stand alone PDF creation tool, OpenOffice does allow you to open and print it’s native files as well as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents and some image formats.
• ps2pdf: If you are comfortable working with the command line then you might like to check out this option. ps2pdf uses Ghostscript to convert postscript files to PDF. Most Linux operating systems support the creation of postscript files natively.

As you can see, the number of Linux PDF creators is quite limited at the moment, but last year at the Linux Desktop Printing Summit, it was agreed that PDF would replace PostScript as the standard print job transfer and processing format for Linux, so hopefully this will mean a number of high quality PDF printer drivers become available for Linux in the not-to-distant future. Read more here.
Don’t forget, if you don’t want to install any applications on your machine, you can use one of these free online PDF converters to create your PDF documents, they are completely platform-independent.

Lastly, it’s important to note that a number of applications, such as OpenOffice and Scribus, support exporting to PDF natively, so if you only need to create PDFs from certain applications, you may not need a stand alone PDF creator.

P.S. If I have missed any PDF printer drivers for the Linux platform then please add a comment and I will update the post. Specifically I’m looking for PDF printer drivers similar to Primo PDF or PDF Creator. Cheers.

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• If you are interested in the technical side of PDF [and related technologies] then check out James King’s new blog called Inside PDF. He is the PDF Architect and a Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe — so you are definitely getting the inside word.
• PC Magazine has praised the PDF format and provided readers with reviews of four different PDF creators — Adobe Acrobat, BullZip PDF Printer, deskPDF Professional and PDF Converter Professional 4. It’s definitely not a comprehensive list (or even close) of all the PDF creators out there, so check out the comments section of the article because other readers have suggested some additional PDF creators.
• If you are lucky enough to already have an iPhone, and need to create some PDFs, then check out this new application called iPDF. It is a simple online text editor for creating and distributing PDFs.

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A few interesting links that I’ve come across today:

• Rick Borstein on his Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog has attacked PDF clones as being cheap and inferior imitations of Adobe Acrobat. He obviously knows which side his bread is buttered on.
• Want to convert PDFs to Word, Excel or JPEG? Computer Tips From A Customer Guy has some.. err.. tips.
• Germany company UNIVERSE GmbH have released pdf-Office Professional in Version 7.0.

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Creating a link to a PDF on your website or blog is pretty straight forward as long as you are able to upload files to the hosting server. Once the PDF file has been uploaded it’s simply a matter of linking to where the PDF is located and your web browser will take care of the rest, there is no magic trick to it.

If you have your own domain then doing this is relatively simple — just upload the PDF to your root directory or a sub-directory and format your links like the below, depending on where the file is located:

root directory —> http://www.mydomain.com/mytodolist.pdf
sub-directory —> http://www.mydomain.com/files/mytodolist.pdf

The biggest problem with linking to PDFs from blogs is that not all blogging services allow you to upload files, but if they do, it’s simply a matter of linking to wherever the file has been uploaded to. You should also take into account the usability aspects of linking to PDFs on your website — read one of my previous posts about putting PDF links on web pages.

As for what happens when a user clicks on one of these links, that depends on which PDF reader they have installed. If they have Adobe Reader installed then the PDF will by default open in the browser (which can be a bit of a headache), but if they have something like Foxit Reader, or no PDF reader installed, then they will simply be prompted to download the file to their desktop.

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Word processor documents are for authoring, PDF documents are for sharing. It’s a fairly simple concept, to which even the developers of these Word Processors have cottoned on to. Yet there are still users who insist on sharing their Word processor documents with colleagues, colleagues who do not need to make changes to the document and are only reviewing them, in this authoring format, instead of converting these document into a file sharing format, like PDF.

Is there really any excuse for this given that most decent Word Processors include support for export to PDF? Here is three well known Word Processors that support this much valued functionality.

• Microsoft Office 2007. Microsoft could not deny their customers this functionality any longer, for the latest version of , you can download a Save as PDF plug-in here.
• OpenOffice.org 2. The latest versions of OpenOffice come with Publish to PDF functionality built in. Plus the whole application is free.
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets.Never one to miss a beat Google know what users want and have included a Export to PDF function in their online and free, Word Processor.

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The number of different ways to create PDFs is growing daily. A few years ago if you didn’t have Acrobat, your options for creating PDFs were quite limited, but today there are hundreds, if not thousands, of free and commercial PDF conversion utilities out there that will allow you to create all the PDFs that you could possibly desire. In this post I will list a number of different free online PDF converters.

• PrimoPDF Online - Simply browse to the file to be converted on your machine and upload it for immediate conversion to PDF. Once converted, the resultant PDF file is made available via email.
• LOOP for Firefox - Upload, convert and combine your files to PDF from a tidy toolbar, without the conversion getting in the way of your Web browsing. LOOP for Firefox allows you to convert and combine files to PDF with the click of a button.
• PDF Online - Convert Microsoft Word documents to PDF, Excel XLS to PDF, Powerpoint PPT to PDF, Text TXT to PDF, HTML to PDF, most image formats (JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, etc) to PDF, and much more.
• ExpressPDF - Convert your Microsoft Word and Excel documents and Web pages to PDF.
• Media Convert - Create PDFs from pretty much any file format and convert PDFs to Text Files (.txt), Rich Text Format/MS Word (.rtf), Adobe Postscript (.ps) and Flash SWF (.swf).
• RSS 2 PDF - Convert your RSS feeds into PDFs.

As you can see, there are a number of ways that you can create PDFs online for free. My personal favourite is the LOOP for Firefox that I’ve previous mentioned here, but all of these online services performed pretty well in general and I am sure that one of the services will be to your liking.

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