All Narfed Up photography and words by Bryan Villarin

PDF


Glad I don’t need to use Adobe Reader 9

I’ve been installing Adobe Reader 8.1.2 for our computers at work. Then, I found out there was a new version: Adobe Reader 9.
No thanks. If there’s no security holes, stick to the earlier version because it won’t:

Shove Adobe Air down your throat. (No way to uncheck this.)
Add Acrobat.com to your computer, but not provide a [...]

How to split huge PDF documents for free

At work, one of the attorneys had a humongous PDF document she needed to email a lot of other attorneys outside the office. I tried extracting pages with an old version of Adobe Acrobat (v5), but the original file still kept the same size (despite having deleted the pages).
With open source (free) software, I [...]

Another PDF creator?

novaPDF came up in my news reader. It’s free, but there’s a notice at the bottom. Please don’t pay $19.95 before you try PDFCreator: it’s truly free and open source. It’s been great!

Foxit PDF Reader

Anybody using the free Foxit PDF Reader, instead of Adobe Reader?

Get PDF SpeedUp

If getting Acrobat Reader 7.0 wasn’t enough, PDF SpeedUp decreases loading time even more. (Going just by feel, though.) The interface isn’t pretty, but it’s a run once, optimize, close and forget it. Plus, they try to plug AcroPDF before the program closes. Just click “No Thanks”. (Do you remember when I posted about PDFCreator? [...]

An Open Source stable PDF creator

Back in September, I posted about CutePDF. However, I think between then and now, on numerous occassions, it would kick print spooler into utilizing all my CPU power until I ended the process. I finally got around to uninstalling it, putting PDFCreator in its place. (It’s also on TheOpenCD, too, but I found out about [...]

Create PDF files for free

Update: I’ve switched to PDFCreator. It’s Open Source, stable, and it hasn’t tied up my print spooler like CutePDF Writer has.
Print from just about anywhere through a PDF driver, then save it as a file. Type a word document just the way you want, convert to PDF, then email to whomever you want. They’ll see [...]