PDFalerts

When I first heard that Adobe were releasing a web conferencing and eLearning product, and that they were calling it Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro, I thought that surely, in some way, it would just be an enhancement to the current collaboration tools available in Adobe Acrobat 8. Boy, was I wrong.

So far I have failed to find any real correlation between Adobe Acrobat (you know the one that creates PDFs and stuff) and Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro (the one that does web conferencing). The only reference to PDF that I was able to find on the home page was a link to download a solution brief for Acrobat Connect Pro in PDF format.

Who knows — maybe Adobe has a master plan where all of this makes sense, or maybe they’re just abusing Adobe Acrobat’s good name to promote an unrelated product. I hope it’s the former.

Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro is now available.

Drumlin Security have announced an update to Drumlin PDF Reader/Publisher and associated digital rights management (DRM) service. Updates include Apple Mac support, Multi-language operation, Secure watermarking and a range of new Licensing options.

Drumlin PDF Reader/Publisher is a PDF control and distribution system for Windows PC and Apple Mac or Unix/Linux computers running Windows software. It allows you to distribute PDFs to third parties and still control whether or not a file can be copied or printed.

Check out Drumlin PDF Reader/Publisher here.

Yesterday we covered PDFoo which allows you to search an index of PDF files found on websites across the Internet. Today we’re covering a Firefox add-on called pdf-google-finder which allows you to find all PDFs that are available from a particular website.

pdf-google-finder adds a menu entry called “Find PDFs for this domain” which will open a new tab with a Google search for PDF files for the domain you are currently browsing.

This is still an experimental add-on and as such doesn’t properly work with Firefox 3 yet (at least on my machines).

Download pdf-google-finder Firefox add-on from here.

We’ve previously covered Loop for Firefox which allows you to “Upload, convert and combine your files to PDF from a tidy toolbar, without the conversion getting in the way of your Web browsing”.

But if you’re just looking for a Firefox add-on that helps you convert web pages to PDF then you should check out PrintPDF.

Currently this Firefox add-on only supports Firefox 3 and doesn’t create hyperlinks in the PDF files.

Once you have installed PrintPDF simply go to File > Print to PDF to convert the web page you are currently viewing to PDF. Your default printer options are used when formatting the page for PDF generation.

Download the PrintPDF Firefox add-on from here.

I just stumbled across PDFoo.com. They have come up with the interesting idea of providing an indexed list of PDF files that are available on websites across the Internet. While I suppose you could achieve the same result using Googles advanced search, PDFoo makes it super easy. They also provide some intelligent details such as most frequently and most recently downloaded files.

PDFoo.com: Your free search PDF files …

Ever since the PDF format came into existence people have extolled it’s potential as an alternative to paper documents. But we don’t live in a completely electronic world, so from time to time, we’re forced to print our PDF documents to paper. Upto this point there hasn’t really been a product that focuses on reducing potential waste in PDF documents that could be printed to paper. This is where GreenPrint comes in.

From printgreener.com:

GreenPrint eliminates wasteful pages in any printout automatically, saving you time and money, and maybe more importantly, saving trees, reducing greenhouse gasses, and decreasing waste.

GreenPrint’s patent-pending technology does this by analyzing each page of every document sent to the printer and looking for typical waste characteristics (like that last page with just a URL, banner ad, logo, or legal jargon).

You can view a video tutorial of GreenPrint here.

It’s certainly an innovative, and timely, marketing angle, and most importantly, it appears to work pretty well too.

While usually the focus is on converting various different file formats to PDF, occasionally you may need to convert PDF documents to some other format. This Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog post provides details (and a script to automate the process) on how to convert PDFs to text files and TIFF files.

Generating TIFF and Text files from PDF for Concordance and Summation

From PR-CANADA.net:

Baltsoft has released Free PDF Converter - http://www.freepdfconvert.com - an affordable online conversion site that lets business people easily convert Microsoft Office documents, images, web pages, and vector graphics files to PDF documents. Without having to purchase expensive conversion software, or spend days learning to run a complicated desktop conversion application, PDF Converter users can quickly convert a large number of files, effortlessly.

If you’re looking for a free online PDF converter check out Free PDF Converter. Not only can you convert various types of documents to PDF, but you can also convert PDFs to Word documents and Excel spreadsheets. I used the service to convert a simple Word document to PDF and it all went pretty smoothly. I was able to download my PDF directly from the website and I also had the option of receiving the converted PDF by email.

Check out this video demo of viewing ebooks (in PDF format) on the iPhone. It looks pretty cool.

Cerience has announced its plans to release the world’s first native PDF viewer for BlackBerry.

RepliGo Reader will provide basic PDF viewing functionality such as zooming in and out of documents and  intelligently reformatting pages to fit the width of your BlackBerry screen. In addition, bookmarks, hyperlinks and searching will also be supported.

You can signup for the beta program of RepliGo Reader on this page.