Information dissemination

            The "printable/portable document format" (PDF) is the only acceptable format that's supposed to be the other name for being 'genuine'. But with spammers resorting to this format for sending their junk emails, it has lost its once formidable status in the past few months. Nevertheless, it is still the preferred format, if you want to publish or create a template/application form.

           The advantage, as you all know, is that a PDF prints and looks exactly as it was designed, on any platform or printer. That was the motto behind the now universally accepted PDF standard. Adobe PDF reader is not the sole owner of PDF, if you are not aware. I cannot stop from suggesting that you might want to try the 'now famous' Foxit PDF reader, as it is 10 times faster than the adobe reader. Adobe is bloated beyond what the people at adobe know and this reader is now milking that disadvantage of adobe reader.

           Coming back to the topic, we all need this PDF format in our daily lives. It might either be to fill in forms, convert your .doc documents to PDFs or split/merge a PDF file. And PDF is a tough nut when you want to do something 'with' it. Given below are a few online services that allow you to manage getting your tasks done.

           The pdf format is slowly becoming part of the "Save As" dialog box on windows. There are quite a few web applications that allow you to convert your .doc to pdf and .xls to pdf.

Zamzar.com has come a long way since it started. This website is now offering a number of file format conversion services and is now part of my "File Conversion" listing too.

Google Docs allows you to save/export your documents as pdf documents. So, give it a shot and make google happy.

Pdfhammer.com, I would say is the gem of all the PDF services. I do not recall how many times I was stuck just because I had a 10 page PDF of which I want to remove one or 2 pages, leaving the remaning intact. Knowing that finding a 'real' PDF editor is remote, I always had to resort to a much lengthier procedure of printing only the pages I want to a "PDF printer" (A printer driver for PDF).

Did you ever try to remove a PDF's protected features? For some reason, some people choose to restrict printing a pdf document and that's the most irksome feature. Why would you want to create a document that no body can print, however confidential that is? You try doing that and I would take screenshots of the same document, make a powerpoint presentation, convert it to word, excel etc, print it and circulate it. Anyway, there is a simple way of going about removing the PDF documents restrictions.

Editing PDF Documents:

     Editing PDF documents is really a pain. The only way of doing it is by using commercial software like "Adobe PDF Writer". Now by "Editing" I mean, to actually open a PDF and edit the text in it. You can always try the PDF to Word and then Word to PDF back using one of the above services but you then are not really editing it but creating PDFs.

PDF Tools for the Desktop PC:

Rotate PDF pages:

   This is the most useful and the rare bird of all the links on this page. Rotating a page is the difficult part and if you had searched for it online, you might have found a lot of commercial software and no free one. Try the following and you need not install anything on your machine. It is a command line tool where you just need to type one command to rotate the pages you need in your pdf document. You are definitely going to appreciate it.