The now ubiquitous PDF — or Portable Document Format — was developed by Adobe some 17 years ago. It allows you to exchange formatted (“fixed layout”) electronic documents or document “captures” as files — from virtually any application, on any computer system — and have them appear securely on the recipient’s screen exactly as they were intended — whatever his/her computer, or wherever they may be. As a format, it has been globally accepted as de facto industry standard for portable documents for years now.
So you’ll find PDF files across Windows, Macs, Linux, Unix, cell phones, and printers look the same in terms of layout and fonts. To view a file in PDF format, all you need is a free tool like Adobe Reader. PDFs can also be protected from unauthorised viewing, printing, copying, or editing if needed. Plus, you can create files with annotations, hyperlinks, bookmarks — even interactive forms — and share them over e-mail and on the Internet. You can create PDF files with the full blown paid application like Adobe Acrobat X (www.adobe [1]. com) as well as several free work-alike programmes.
Creating PDFs online and offline
The easiest way to create a PDF file in a hurry if you don’t have a programme installed and don’t have the time to install one either is to go online to a free online conversion service like www.zamzar.com [2] or www.freepdfconvert.com [3], or www.pdfonline [4]. com or www.doc2pdf.net/converter [5]. Apart from the de rigueur Microsoft Word, PowerPoint and Excel (DOC, RTF, PPT, PUB, XLS, HTML, and TXT) document files, some of these also accept image formats like JPG, GIF, TIFF, BMP, PNG, EMF, and WMF for conversions to a PDF.
If you don’t want to depend on an online tool, CutePDF Writer (www.cutepdf.com [6]) is a very reliable, small and efficient PDF file generator. Though its files are bigger than Acrobat's, it does its job well. If you need another option to save your files as in PDF format, try PrimoPDF (www.primopdf.com [7]) or doPDF (www.dopdf.com [8]). And then there is the ultra small TinyPDF (www.tinypdf.com [9]).
Editing and Securing Them
To ensure tamperproof PDFs you need PDFCreator (http://is [10]. gd/gPHFy). It encrypts your PDFs and protects them from being opened, or even printed etc. without a passcode. PDFCreator can create PDFs, mail generated files, autosave files to folders and filenames based on tags like username, date, time etc., and merge multiple files into a single PDF.
Another programme called PDFill (http://is.gd/gPHMX [11]) allows you to merge, split, reorder, encrypt, decrypt, etc., as well as create or edit a header, footer, watermark... and convert images to PDF, PDF to images, and Postscript to PDF; and delete/flatten/list elements.
Can I Do it Faster?
While Adobe Reader is the best PDF reader you can get, it is very full featured and thus can be lethargic on slower and underpowered machines like Netbooks. A programme like FoxIt Reader (http://is.gd/gPIlY [12]), for one, is smaller to download and faster to run. If you want something even skinnier, try the minimalistic Sumatra PDF (http://is.gd/gPIwC [13]).
The writer is a part-time publishing consultant and a full-time devotee of all things tech. Contact him at
ashishone@gmail.com [14]
Links:
[1] http://www.adobe
[2] http://www.zamzar.com
[3] http://www.freepdfconvert.com
[4] http://www.pdfonline
[5] http://www.doc2pdf.net/converter
[6] http://www.cutepdf.com
[7] http://www.primopdf.com
[8] http://www.dopdf.com
[9] http://www.tinypdf.com
[10] http://is
[11] http://is.gd/gPHMX
[12] http://is.gd/gPIlY
[13] http://is.gd/gPIwC
[14] mailto:ashishone@gmail.com