A few people will appreciate some of Adobe Reader’s lesser-used features, such as the ability to digitally sign documents. However, Adobe Reader arguably has too many features. Features like allowing PDFs to run JavaScript code have unsurprisingly led to security holes in the past, and it’s clear that most people would be better off with a faster, minimal, more secure PDF reader.

Firefox

Mozilla introduced an integrated PDF viewer, known as PDF.js, in Firefox 19. You don’t need a PDF viewer installed on your computer – when you open a PDF in Firefox, Firefox’s integrated PDF viewer will take care of things.

Firefox’s PDF viewer actually isn’t a browser plug-in at all. It’s written in JavaScript, the same scripting language used by web pages in your  browser. This means that Firefox’s PDF viewer is fully sandboxed the same way web pages are, which gives you additional security benefits. When you use a plug-in like Adobe Reader, your browser’s built-in security doesn’t necessarily apply – you’re relying on the plug-in’s developers instead.

Chrome

Google Chrome also has an integrated PDF viewer, which it’s had since 2010. Unlike Firefox’s PDF viewer, Chrome’s PDF viewer is actually a plug-in bundled with Chrome. Google handles updates for the plug-in, just as it handles updates for Chrome itself and Chrome’s bundled Flash plug-in.

You can use your browser’s built-in PDF viewer to view local PDF files, too. You can even make Firefox or Chrome your default PDF viewer by right-clicking a PDF file on your computer, selecting the Open With option, and selecting Firefox or Chrome. Your browser will open and display the PDF whenever you double-click a PDF file on your computer.

Windows 8

Windows was the last mainstream operating system to add PDF support, and Windows 8 finally comes with a PDF viewer, known as “Reader”. Unfortunately, Reader is a “Modern” app and there’s no included desktop version of Reader. You can open PDFs from the desktop and they’ll open in the full-screen Reader app by default, but if you want a desktop application so you can view PDFs while you do other things on your computer, Reader just doesn’t cut it.

If you want to read PDFs on the desktop, you can use the PDF support built into Firefox or Chrome. You can also use a third-party PDF reader.

Mac, Linux, iOS, & Android

On other operating systems, we’ve taken for granted that Adobe Reader isn’t required. Macs come with Preview, Linux distributions come with Evince or another PDF reader, Android has a built-in PDF viewer, and iPhones and iPads also have built-in PDF support.

Adobe Reader is actually available for all of these operating systems, although the version of Adobe Reader available for Linux is outdated. You’ll find Adobe Reader on Apple’s app store and Android’s Google Play, but the included apps should work fine for you.

Alternative PDF Readers For Windows

We’ve covered a variety of great alternative PDF readers in the past, including the well-known Foxit Reader, super-lightweight Sumatra PDF, and more. If you want to install a third-party PDF reading app on your PC, check out our list of the best PDF readers for Windows.

These PDF readers are often faster than Adobe Reader because they don’t pack in as many features. They may not work properly if you need support for digital signatures, filling and validating built-in forms, and other features. In these cases, you may need to use Adobe Reader. However, most PDFs are just documents you view – that was the original point of a PDF, after all. For the majority of people, the above solutions will offer a better experience.

Alternative PDF readers are also often more secure, as security vulnerabilities found in Adobe Reader generally don’t affect these other PDF readers. Adobe Reader’s additional features add up to a bigger target for attackers to exploit.

What do you use to view PDFs? Do you stick with your platform’s built-in PDF reader or do you use an alternative PDF reader? Leave a comment and tell us what you make use of!

The post This Is Why You Don’t Need Adobe Reader appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Since I have gone practically paperless in my day-to-day workflow, an application like PDF Stacks ($39.00) is one I should have started using a long time ago. This program does for PDFs what iTunes does for music files. It enables you to organize, read, print, search, and share your PDFs, and it alleviates the hassle of scattering PDFs throughout different folders. We’re giving away 25 copies of PDF Stacks for both PC and Mac. Find out how you can win one after the review.

Main Setup

PDF Stacks consists of a simple, straightforward user interface with only the most essential features you need for managing and reading your PDF documents.

After you install the program, you can enable it to locate and import all the PDFs it discovers on your computer. If it finds several thousand PDFs that you rather not take the time to filter out which ones you want to import, you can simply close the Import window, and use instead File > Import PDF Files… in the menubar. PDF Stacks copies imported PDFs into its own file directory/folder, which will automatically be added to your Documents folder.

If you later decide to use the global import process, you can find that feature under Help > Getting Started…

PDF Stacks displays all your documents in its Library, and it includes copyright information (e.g. title, number of pages, author(s), year of publication, source) that it finds embedded within each document file. You can manually edit and add information for each file via the Inspector. This information is of course, searchable within the application.

What’s convenient about PDFStacks is that you can preview and open documents within the Library. You can read documents full-screen or in a separate tab, which alleviates desktop clutter. PDFStacks doesn’t include annotation tools, but it does contain a handy pop-up notebook which you can access in the Inspector or as a separate window while in full screen mode. A nice plus is that your notes are also searchable.

Other Features

You can organize your imported PDFs into collections, based on topic, projects, author, etc.. If your library contains several hundred unorganized PDFs, you’ll probably want to use PDFStacks’s search and filter feature to assist you in locating PDFs to be placed in the proper collection. You can also right-click on the titles of individual files and add them to one or more collections, or to reveal them in the directory folder.

If you’re using PDF Stacks for academic purposes, the application includes a feature for searching Google Scholar and PubMed. You can save the results of searches, and you can even match searches to existing PDFs. Search results will include the URL and other references for imported articles.

PDF Stacks runs on both PC and Mac, and you can download the fully functional trial version and use it for 15 days. A purchased full version of the $39 program never expires. We have 25 copies of PDF Stacks to give away this week, so join the contest to be in the running to win one.

How do I win a copy of PDF Stacks?

Step 1: Fill in the giveaway form

Please fill in the form with your real name and email address so that we can get in touch if you are chosen as a winner. MakeUseOf giveaways are open to readers worldwide.

The giveaway code required to activate the form is available from our Facebook page, Twitter stream and Google+ page.
 

Step 2: Share!

You’re almost done. Now, all that’s left to do is to share the post!

(Note: no points will be awarded.)

Alternative entry method: Use your points!

Exchange your MakeUseOf points for an entry into the competition. First, create a MakeUseOf account, earn points and exchange your points for an entry! Learn more about our Game system and Rewards program.

Sorry, the competition is now over

By participating in this giveaway, you agree to the giveaway rules.

This giveaway begins now and ends Friday, March 1st. The winners will be selected at random and informed via email.

Spread the word to your friends and have fun!

Interested in sponsoring a giveaway? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via the form at the bottom of this page.

The post PDFStacks: Managing, Reading, and Searching Your PDFs Made Easy [Giveaway] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The world has moved on, and with it, there are now awesome file formats that are available to you, depending on the purpose that you have for those files.

In this article, I’d like to cover the two most popular file types for the three media types – typed documents, photo and image files, and sound or music files. Those are the three most prevalent formats used both online and offline to experience information. It stands to reason that the most common file types for each of those media formats should be ones that are easy to use both on the Internet as well as on devices that aren’t always online – like music players or e-book readers.

By understanding the main differences between these major file types, it’ll help you to decide which one to use when you’re trying to distribute information or media in a way that the largest number of people out there will be able to use. By making your information highly-accessible and usable, you can be sure that whatever you’re trying to distribute will see a larger audience.

Documents, Pictures & Audio

If you think about it, most information today takes three major forms – text, sight or sound.  Whether you’re talking about web pages, movies or any other form of entertainment, information is presented to the audience in one or more of those three major formats.

The web has always been very text-based, but more recently it’s becoming wonderfully visual. Web pages now offer a wonderful morphing of text, visual layouts and video content. You can stream news video or major movies, and podcasts and music downloads are now pretty much ingrained into our daily lives.

So, if you’re a producer of information, how do you know what file format to use? The answer boils down to how you want to distribute or use that file.

PNG vs. JPG

These days, website owners use JPG and PNG files almost interchangeably, and many bloggers on services like WordPress.org or Blogger and are completely oblivious to the effects of large image sizes will actually use those images interchangeably. However, more experienced website owners know that not only will smaller image sizes reduce your overall server memory consumption, but they’ll also increase page load speed, which is a nice SEO boost as well.

This is the major difference between JPG and PNG – file size – but the reasons aren’t obvious until you take a closer look at the images themselves. Below is a beautiful forest-scene in JPG format.

This is a very large image over 1000 pixels wide, and featuring vibrant colors and details. JPG (which stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group) has always been an image file type of choice for professional photographers to share there work online because of the fact that the compression of highly-detailed images  involves finding redundancies in those files and compressing the data so that beautiful images like the one above can still be presented with very little quality loss. The file size is  a fraction of the original that may come straight from a digital camera.

However, because of the compression method, JPG formats have some issues with contrasting edges in photos. This is most prevalent with text, signs, etc – but if you zoom in far enough even into a nice, high-quality image like the one above, you can see the quality reduction along those straight edges in the form of a sort of “shadow” along the edge.

After a number of multiple saves, you can see the quality of the image reduce even further when you zoom back in. In this case the meshing between edges becomes more pronounced, and you can see near highly-contrasting colors that there’s a greater amount of distortion.

By contrast, take a look at another highly-detailed PNG image of a park with strong contrasting black/white colors. Such an image would do a number to the JPG compression process – not so apparent from a distance, but much more apparent as you zoom in.

However, zooming into the PNG image, you can see that there’s no “shadow” effect or any significant distortion of the contrasting edges.

PNG stands for Portable Network Graphics, and was originally created as a replacement for the outdated GIF format. The PNG compression algorithm is non-lossy. When you save this PNG file again, the quality of the saved image is identical to the original.

Another huge benefit to PNG image files is that they support image transparency – making them awesome image formats for web design, because you can use a transparent icon or image that blends seamlessly into a website with any sort of background color or image. See the JPG image on the left, and the PNG image on the right over a blue background.

So how do you choose which image format to use? Basically, if you want to provide extremely high-quality photographs on a blog post or on a web page, save it once as a JPG file and embed it on your site. Avoid making too many modifications and performing multiple saves as you’ll lose quality.

On the other hand, if you’re creating icons or images with sharp contrasting colors – like images with text for example – then go with PNG. Also, PNG is particularly valuable in web design when you want those nice flowing layouts with transparent images. Just keep in mind that PNG file sizes are typically larger than JPG, so plan accordingly.

DOC Vs. PDF

When it comes to providing documents to people – whether it’s offering a formatted document via a website, or sending documents to people via email such as when you’re applying for a job, the most common file formats of choice are Word Documents or Adobe PDF files.

Here’s what happens if you try to offer a Word Document link in a web page.

That’s right, it’s not supported as an embedded type of document – you can’t view it inside of a browser because it’s a proprietary file format. Of course – try saying “you can’t” to a geek, and they’ll find a way to pull it off. You can always take Yaara’s approach and get the document into Google Docs for online viewing.  Where there’s a will, there’s a way.

However, most methods of doing this involves having Microsoft Word in the first place. If you aren’t certain whether your recipient has Microsoft Word, then it might be better to present your information in PDF format, using any number of PDF creation software that’s available out there. When you go to open a PDF file on your computer, you’ll see just how many applications out there are capable of viewing it.

There are lots of PDF readers out there, and as Chris points out in his article on PDF readers, if you have Google Chrome then you already have a PDF reader.

So, one would think that PDF is always the way to go when you want to distribute documents, right? I mean, you can embed them in web pages, they make idea e-book formats for smaller mobile displays, and they transcend multiple operating systems. What could be better?

Of course, the catch is that they are locked down – they can’t be changed. That’s not very helpful when you are collaborating with someone on a writing project or a research project and you want the sort of tools that you can find in Microsoft Word for editing. So, there’s certainly a place for the Word format in sharing documents, but it comes down to how you want to use that document and why you’re sharing it.

MP3 Vs FLAC

That leaves audio. Maybe you’re thinking of recording yourself playing guitar and you want to share it on your blog, or maybe you are buying music and you have the choice to download a loss-less format like FLAC or a compressed format like MP3. Which do you choose, and why?

This topic is actually well-debated throughout the Internet. Plenty of music fans feel that MP3 files have enough quality as to be indistinguishable from the original recorded sound files. Other folks – usually those within the music recording community – feel that the quality difference is obvious and very noticeable.

To take a closer look at this, I downloaded a free classical song from the Internet that was available in the full, lossless FLAC format. Playing this file in Audacity, it was quite apparent how nice it is to have an audio file in this format.

The music was crisp, clear, and remarkable. My first test was to export that original recording as an MP3 file using the default Audacity export settings. Then, opening both files side-by-side, I took a closer look at the sound files.

You can actually see the subtle difference when you do a side-by-side comparison. It isn’t quite as obvious on this snapshot, but if you look close you can see that the graph for the MP3 file (the bottom stereo tracks) are not quite as dark as the top FLAC format. This is most apparent on that first section of the graph where the far edges of the response (shown by the first arrow) are definitely more defined in the FLAC file.

I have to be honest that I didn’t notice a substantial difference when listening to the two audio files, but then again my ears are not as well trained as some of the music recording experts out there. I suspect they could hear the difference.

Checking the MP3 export settings in audacity, I saw that my export settings were an MP3 bitrate of 128 kbps.

So, I tweaked this up to the maximum allowable – 320 kbps, and then repeated the exercise above.

This time, the differences between the FLAC track and the MP3 track were almost indistinguishable from each other. Given, the new MP3 file much larger than the 128 kbps file – 12 mb versus 5 mb, but it was still half the size of the original 24 mb FLAC file.

So, when do you use one versus the other? If you’re recording music and you want to maintain the highest possible quality, FLAC or any other lossless format is obviously the way to go. This will ensure that you’re capturing every little nuance of the performance. With the capacity of disk drives these days heading into the Terabytes of storage capacity, saving such audio files is really not a huge feat.

However, if you’re a collector of music and you just want to store as much as possible on your little portable player – MP3 is clearly the way to go. Secondly, if you run a podcast and want to ensure that your listeners are not sitting their all day waiting for the Podcast download, the MP3 format is still the audio format of choice.

In nearly every case, whether you’re talking documents, images or sound – the format you opt for almost always depends on where you draw the line between quality versus space or download time. There’s a place for both, but you need to carefully consider how you’re going to use that file, and choose the right file format for the purpose.

Does this help with your own file format dilemmas? Do you have any other file formats you prefer above those mentioned above? Share your own thoughts and insights in the comments section below.

Image Credit: Boy Listening to Music Via Shutterstock

The post Know When to Use Which File Format: PNG vs. JPG, DOC vs. PDF, MP3 vs. FLAC appeared first on MakeUseOf.

InstaWeb takes any website and converts it to a PDF so you can get access to it even without cell phone service. If you find yourself in situations where cellular data is not available, having some reading material close at hand is incredibly useful. InstaWeb makes accomplishing this as simple as a couple of taps on your iPhone.

Best of all, you can grab InstaWeb free for a limited time from the App Store. The app normally sells for $2.99, so this is your chance to get a great deal on an easy to use app with some really cool functionality.

Features

The main purpose of this app is converting websites to PDF files. You can do this in a couple of ways. Both of them require you to use the built-in browser to go to the site you want to convert to a PDF. Once on the particular page, you click the app’s logo on the bottom right of the screen, and the whole page will be saved as a PDF for to you read anytime, regardless of whether you have data on your device.

The other option for turning websites into PDFs is accomplished by pulling down on the page, like you would do to refresh in some other apps. This will cause it to clean up all the extras from the page, and just grab the article portion, similar to how Evernote Clearly works on a computer. Once it finishes cleaning up the page, it will show it to you, and give you the option to turn the cleaned up version into a PDF.

So what can you do with these files once you have them? First, you can click the “PDFs” button at the bottom of the screen to read them at your convenience. Depending on which method you used to convert the page into a PDF, you may have to zoom in to read the PDFs on the small iPhone screen.

You can also email the PDF files to anyone. This allows you to send it to yourself to read on your desktop, or to a friend if you think they might find a particular article interesting. To do this, you simply click on the PDF, and click the envelope icon at the top of the screen.

You can also print the PDF if your prefer to do your reading on paper. This is accomplished the same way as emailing, but instead of clicking the envelope, click the printer icon.

If you click the “Settings” button on the bottom of the screen, you will see an option to link the app with your Dropbox account. In doing so, you will be able to upload any PDF file for viewing anywhere. To actually upload the PDF, click the arrow next to its name in the list, and you will see a “Dropbox” button. Click that, and within a few seconds, the file will be uploaded and ready to access anywhere you go.

Conclusion

If you are looking for a cool app for storing webpages in PDF format for offline viewing, this is the perfect one for you. You can read, print, email, and even upload to Dropbox from this one app. You can even get the normally paid app for free from the App Store if you act fast. Don’t wait though, because before you know it, the app will be back to its regular price of $2.99!

The post InstaWeb – Turn Any Webpage Into a PDF For Offline Reading [iOS, Free For A Limited Time] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

If you can relate to any of those, then the Chrome extension, Send To Google Docs, is a great solution and has earned a spot on our Best Of Chrome Extensions page under “Productivity”.

The Easy Setup & Install

Send To Google Docs, like any extension in the Chrome Web Store, installs in your browser with one click. Often though, extensions require some additional customization of options before you start using them (e.g. creating an account, changing default settings, etc.). However, Send To Google Docs is ready to use right away. There are a couple of options to explore though.

The first is “Save without Preview” which saves to Google Drive without showing the preview window first. This allows you to quickly save pages without taking time away from whatever you were doing.

Next are the conversion settings. If you don’t have a Pdfcrowd account (which is the service the extension uses), this isn’t relevant to you. And although you can create an account for free, the real benefits of having an account (both for this extension and their service) come with a premium monthly subscription.

How Google Drive Handles The Imported PDF

There isn’t really anything that “pops out” – it is just how you would expect a webpage to converted from HTML to PDF and saved in Google Drive. And if that is exactly what you want, then it does it well – which is good if you like simplicity.

Recently, Erez said regarding an app he was reviewing:

Please, please, resist the temptation to add features.

This is great advice for the majority of extensions and apps that are being developed. However, there are a couple of things I feel could be improved upon.

Weaknesses Of The Extension

When you “clip” your first page to Google Drive, you’ll quickly see that there are a couple of flaws that come with it. First it doesn’t detect the specific page content and save only that in PDF form to Google Drive. This is a feature that is pretty widespread and used in many other tools and extensions such as the popular Evernote Web Clipper and Clearly. Of course, this would mean that it didn’t convert the whole page to PDF, which is what it is supposed to do, but this would be a nice option to have added.

Another shortfall of this extension is that it doesn’t organize the content at all on the page. In a way, I’ve already mentioned this about detecting the content, but this is still different. When you save a page to Google Drive, it is saved “as is” with no editing whatsoever. That means if some text or an image falls on a page break between two pages, it will get split up instead of moved down.

Sometimes the text is even split down the middle of the line so it becomes completely unreadable. This is counterproductive to saving the page in Google Drive to read later as it can’t be read entirely if this occurs on the page. It also makes printing quite difficult and unprofessional.

Conclusion

Perhaps these weaknesses put a bad taste in your mouth for this extension. Don’t get me wrong – it is good. But it could be better. Personally, I’m not a developer, but in my experience of using other tools which don’t have the issues that I’ve expressed with this one, I don’t feel it would be too difficult to improve upon.

Again, if you are looking for a tool to send webpages to Google Drive and convert them as well (instead of just saving them as a link), this tool works pretty good.

If saving to Google Drive isn’t a must, you might want to look into the MakeUseOf article Top Tips & Tools To Help With Printing Webpages, which covers tools that, yes, can print, but also ones that can save and extract the text in an easy to read format.

Do you use Google Drive to save your web articles to read later? Or have you wanted to and are now able to with this tool? If you use the Send To Google Docs Chrome extension, how does it help you?

The post Send To Google Docs – Convert HTML To PDF & Save It In A Single Click [Chrome] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

That’s one of the most crucial issues with these kind of  apps – you take them for granted, and think you know them inside out, but the chances are you don’t.

Rather more likely is the fact that Preview is still hiding some succulent feature beneath its surface, because however lightweight it feels, make no mistake – it’s riddled with features. Below, we’ve listed ten Preview-related tips and features that you definitely need to know about.

1. Open Multiple Files In One Preview Window

Preview is very apt at handling multiple files at once. You can open one file after the other, creating a separate preview window for each file, but it’s much easier to work with multiple files in a single preview window.

To do this, just select multiple files in Finder using your mouse or the shift and cmd keys, and open them. By opening all these files at once, they will show in a single Preview window, with a file overview in the Preview sidebar.

2. Delete Files

If you have multiple files open in a single preview window, you can use Preview to move one or more of these files to the trash. This is great for culling the bad pictures from a big selection of photographs or screenshots.

Select the files you’d like to delete among the thumbnails in the Preview sidebar, right-click and select Move To Trash, or press cmd+backspace.

3. Create A File From The Clipboard

Since Mac OS X automatically renders files from your screenshots, this feature isn’t often highlighted. However, if you copy a picture from a website, or copy a selection of another picture to your clipboard, it’s a great tool to have in your toolbox.

To create a new file from the clipboard, just select File -> New from Clipboard, or press cmd+N.

4. Manage & Merge PDF Files

You probably already know of Preview’s ability to read PDF files, but it can do much more with those PDF files than just showing them to you. Most of the tips above and below that apply to pictures also apply to PDF files. However, the one feature that stands out is Preview’s ability to manage and merge PDF files.

Rearranging PDF files in Preview is as simple as dragging the pages around in Preview’s thumbnail sidebar. You can even select multiple pages before rearranging them. Deleting a page works just as described for pictures above, you select one or more pages and press cmd + backspace to delete them from the PDF. Finally, to merge two PDF files, just open one file and drag another in Preview’s thumbnail sidebar.

5. File Sharing

It’s very easy to share your pictures or documents to friends and colleagues right from within preview. This includes emailing, using iMessage, AirDrop, Twitter, Facebook and Flickr.

To share a file from Preview, just press the share icon at the top of the document (which looks like a box with an arrow inside), and select one of the sharing options. You can also add the picture to iPhoto the same way.

6. Annotation Tools

Preview comes with a wealth of annotation tools. You can draw shapes, arrows and text boxes on any kind of document, with varying color and line width. When you’re browsing a PDF document, you can also use Preview to highlight individual sentences.

The full array of annotation tools becomes visible when you press the annotation icon next to the search field, or select Tools -> Annotate.

7. Select & Cropping Tools

You don’t need a copy of PhotoShop for rudimentary photo manipulation. One of the things that Preview does almost as well is extracting elements of an image. When you press the annotation icon (left of the search field), a number of selection tools appear to the right of your screen. These include a rectangular selector, elliptical selector, lasso selection, smart lasso and instant alpha.

Using smart lasso, click in an area and slightly drag your mouse in any direction to specify the amount of tolerance that should be used in marking out the boundaries of that area’s selection. You can then copy that selection to your clipboard and create a new document as outlined above, or press backspace to make that part of your image transparent.

8. Color Management

A different kind of photo manipulation is provided through Preview’s built-in color management. Again, you can view this option by pressing the annotation button next to the search field, or by selecting Tools -> Annotate.

Pressing the prism icon in the annotation bar will open the Adjust Color pane. Hear you can tweak the picture’s levels, exposure, contrast, saturation, sharpness, and more.

9. Built-In Version History

In later versions of Mac OS X, Preview comes with built-in version support. This means you can go back in time and go through a number of different iterations of your file, Time Machine-style.

To do so, go to File -> Revert To -> Browse All Versions, or press the little disclosure triangle next to a file’s name in the title bar and select Browse All Versions.

10. Lock That Document

As you’ve seen above, Preview provides a lot of ways to manipulate a document. Sometimes we’re looking for exactly the opposite: keeping it safe from careless hands. Luckily, Preview is able to lock a document on your request.

To lock a document, press the disclosure triangle next to the document’s name in the title bar as show above. In the ensuing drop-down menu, select Lock. This is also where you’ll be able to later unlock the document.

Do you know of any other exciting Preview tricks? Let us know in the comments section below the article!

The post 10 Tips You Need to Know About Mac Preview appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Thankfully, there are plenty of applications all over the web which can read these files. However, they all have different feature sets as well as other pros and cons. So, what are the best Linux PDF viewers?

Evince

Evince is the default PDF viewer which comes with the Gnome desktop environment. Therefore, it is automatically included with distributions like Ubuntu, Fedora, and openSUSE when Gnome is chosen over KDE. This PDF viewer excels in being extremely lightweight and quick to load. It is also very easy to navigate around in, as there is just a left panel which shows small snapshots of each page of the PDF or a small index listing of all sections in the PDF (if it has been formatted correctly to do so), and then the rest of the window goes towards displaying the actual document.

Besides very small features like bookmarks, it only has view control functions such as zoom and fit to window.

Okular

On the other side of the spectrum is Okular, the default PDF viewer for the KDE desktop environment. It is included in distributions which come with KDE, such as Kubuntu, Fedora’s KDE spin, and openSUSE when KDE is chosen over Gnome. While Evince may have specialized in being lightweight, Okular is much heavier but includes a good number of useful features.

Okular also boasts support for a number of other file types, including Postscript, DjVu, CHM, XPS, ePub, TIFF, DIV, FictionBook, ComicBook, and others.

Adobe Reader

If you want to use a PDF viewer which comes from the developers who defined the PDF format in the first place, then you should take a look at Adobe Reader. It is essentially what you’ve come to expect from the Windows version: feature-filled, but not as lightweight as the other available solutions. However, you do get plenty of features that you’ll definitely not see in other PDF viewers, such as the ability to sign and configure security preferences, have it read out loud, and more.

There are also some useful features which are included in some applications like FoxItReader (see below), such as automatic scrolling.

FoxIt Reader

Last but definitely not least of all Linux PDF viewers is FoxItReader. This PDF viewer is known for being quick, fairly feature-filled, and cross platform. It’s also the PDF viewer of choice for those who like to have portable apps on their flash drives. Thankfully there multiple options available for Linux, downloadable in a DEB, RPM, and Bz2 package, so it can be installed on most distributions.

Conclusion

You’re never out of options when it comes to PDF viewers. Of course, there are still others which you can choose from, but from Linux’s smaller list of viewers (when compared to Windows), these are definitely the most popular and outstanding choices available. Of course, it all depends on your own preferences as to which one is best for you, but you can’t go wrong with using any of these solutions.

What Linux PDF viewer do you use, and why do you like it the most? Let us know in the comments!

The post 4 Best Linux PDF Viewers – And Adobe Reader Is Just One Of Them [Linux] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

These operations aren’t normally possible with such easy, free tools. I’ve personally used PDFSam to combine multiple documents scanned to PDF into a single file, reorder pages in a scanned PDF, and extract a single important page from a large, unwieldy PDF document. If you want to do some basic PDF splitting, merging, and reordering, PDFSam is the application for you.

Merging PDFs

Admittedly, PDFSam’s interface is a bit clunky and dated, but it works fine once you get the hang of it.

Let’s say you want to combine multiple PDFs into one file, attaching each PDF after the other as if you’re virtually stapling them together. You’d click the Merge/Extract plugin in the sidebar. Once in the Merge/Extract pane, click the Add button and add the PDFs you want to merge. You can reorder them in the list so they’re in the order you want them in.

Use the Browse button to specify the destination of a new PDF file and click Run. PDFSam will create a new PDF file that contains all the pages from the PDF file you specified.

Merging or Extracting Individual Pages

Let’s say you wanted to merge together specific pages from the PDFs, instead. You could scroll to the right in the Merge/Extract plugin and use the Page Selection box, where you want enter a range of pages or a single page. For example, in the screenshot below, we’re taking pages 1 and 2 from the first PDF, page 5 from the second PDF, and pages 8 through 10 from the third PDF to create a new, six-page PDF document.

If you only have a single PDF in this list and select specific pages here, you can create a new PDF that contains only the specified pages from the original. However, the Visual document composer plugin is an easier, visual way to extract individual pages (see below for more information on that plugin).

Splitting PDFs

The Split plugin allows you to split PDFs into smaller files. After you add a PDF using the Add button, there are a number of options you can choose. For example, Burst splits the PDF into single-page PDF files. If you want to split a PDF document into two at a specific point, you can use the Split after these pages option and enter the page number where you want the split to occur.

Reordering a PDF

If you’d like to rearrange a PDF’s pages – perhaps they were scanned in the wrong order – you can easily do that with the Visual reorder plugin.

Open a PDF on the Visual reorder pane and you’ll see preview thumbnails of its pages. You can drag and drop these files to rearrange them and use the Rotate and Delete buttons to rotate or delete individual pages. Like with the other plugins, use the Run button to create a new PDF file after making your changes.

Visual Document Composer

The Visual document composer plugin works similarly to the Visual reorder plugin, but it allows you to open multiple PDF files. Previews of each PDF files’ pages will appear in the pane at the top of the window, and you can drag and drop them to the middle pane to create a new PDF file that incorporates pages from multiple PDF files.

Rotate

The Rotate plugin is self-explanatory. It allows you to easily rotate pages in a PDF file, selecting a precise rotation and choosing the pages that will be rotated. You can even rotate multiple PDF files at once.

This plugin may seem underwhelming, but you’ll appreciate it if you have PDF files that need to be rotated.

Alternate Mix

The Alternate Mix plugin is another plugin that will only come in handy in specific situations. If you have one PDF file containing all the even pages of a document and one PDF file containing all the odd pages of a document, the Alternate Mix pages will combine the two PDFs, alternating pages and putting them in the correct order.

PDFSam is a life saver if you need to quickly and easily perform these kinds of PDF operations, which is why it’s one of the applications on our Best Windows Software page. If you’re ever looking for the best application to use for any purpose, skip Google and check our Best Of pages, where we’ve done the hard work of finding the best applications for every platform for you. For example, we’ve got a list of the best PDF readers for Windows.

You may also be interested in reducing the size of a PDF file or using OCR to convert scanned documents back into editable text.

Have you used PDFSam before? Or do you prefer another application for this purpose? Leave a comment and share your knowledge!

The post Use PDFSam To Easily Split, Merge, & Reorder PDF Pages appeared first on MakeUseOf.

Preview is a default application for Mac OS X. If you click and open an image, screenshot, or PDF file, typically Preview is the application you will view those files in. Most novice Mac users may not have noticed the almost hidden features Preview has to offer. I wrote an article about how to use it for photo edits, but now Preview includes several enhancements for those of us who like to annotate PDF documents as we read. The new tools in Preview are nearly unnoticeable, but they are very handy for marking up documents.

Saving Documents as PDFs

First off, Preview can only open PDFs and image files, not text documents saved say in Word or Pages. But you can save nearly any document or webpage as a PDF. In the recent update of Safari 6, if a PDF opens in the web browser, you can now put your cursor toward the middle bottom of the window, and a window will pop-up allowing you to open the PDF straight in Preview or download and save it to your Downloads folder.

This little time saver keeps you from having to use the traditional File > Print > Save as PDF menu selection.

Viewing Features

After you open a PDF in Preview, you have several viewing and navigation features that may not be visible by default. Under View in Preview’s menu, you can preview and navigate thumbnail pages of a PDF, from either the side bar or as a Contact Sheet. If the PDF has a table of contents, you can also view it in the sidebar. Unfortunately, you can’t have the thumbnail and table views open at the same time.

Also in the updated Preview, you can now view a bookmark list of your highlights and notes. More about that later.

Annotation Tools

Preview’s annotation tools are not open by default. You can access them from the application’s menu bar, but if you frequently annotate documents, you might as well open them under the toolbar: View > Show Edit Toolbar. The tools include a Rectangle and Oval, Line and Arrow, Speech and Thought Bubbles, Note, Signature, Color and Line Attributes on the left side; and Text and Rectangle Selections, and Crop to Selection on the right side.

These tools are pretty standard, but Apple adds a little eye candy to the marker tool. Like the highlight tool in iBooks, the highlights made in Preview resemble how real handheld markers look when making page highlights – soft rough edges, instead of a straight rectangle.

You can right- or Control-click on a highlight and append a note to it, change its color, change it to an underline, or delete it all together. The bubble tools are another cool useful tool for adding notes and keeping them visible on the page.

On the other hand, the sticky notes tools – which also has a realistic look – closes after you type a note. You click to open it back up. The Text tool is for making in-line notes on a page, without any boxes or backgrounds. You can use the Font tool to change the font and size of notes.

You can of course click on any annotation to delete it. You can also select an annotation, click on the Color tool and change the note’s current color.

If you simply want to select some text to say copy and paste, select the “A” icon on the right side of the menubar.

Crop & Magnifier Tools

Though the Crop tool is traditionally used for cropping images in Preview, you can also use it to crop out any text on a page you don’t want to keep. You first select the Rectangular Selection tool on the right side, and then draw a selection around the text you want to keep on a page. When you click the Crop tool to the right of the Rectangular tool, content outside the selection will be removed.

Unfortunately, it appears as though the crops are permanent to a document as it is saved, so you probably will want to make a copy of the PDF before making the crops.

If you’re reading say a manual in which parts of the text or images are tool small, Preview’s Magnifier can be real handy for this purpose.

Bookmarking Pages

The biggest shortcoming to Preview when compared to say Skim, is that though you can bookmark pages in a document, those bookmarks can’t be managed into folders. Thus if you do a lot bookmarking, you get a long growing list of bookmarks that appear under Bookmarks in the menu.

View Notes & Highlights

Under View > Highlights & Notes, you get a list of your highlights including the text you highlighted. However, in terms of notes, only the yellow sticky notes get listed – not the bubble or in-line notes you make.

Saving Documents & Edits

As with Apple’s other text-based applications, Preview now saves documents to iCloud, as well as to the Finder. You can also rename the title for a document (as well as duplicate or relocate it) by clicking on the title in the toolbar.

If a PDF will not allow you to save annotations on it, Preview will make a duplicate of the document and ask if you want to save the annotations on it.

Let us know what you think of the new Preview and its annotation features. Are you a regular user of Preview? What additional features would you like to see included?

The post How To Use The New & Improved Tools In Mountain Lion’s Preview App appeared first on MakeUseOf.

PDF Zen’s editing features include adding new text, highlighting existing text, adding comments and drawing on any part of a PDF file. These edits, once made, can be easily shared on Facebook and Twitter, embedded into a web page, privately distributed via a link or downloaded using functionality built in to the service.

While most features are free, users will have to pay to send documents by fax. Faxes can be purchased in bundles of 10, 50, 150 or 350 pages. Users who fax frequently can subscribe to a monthly fax plan for as little as four dollars per month.

Users on all platforms, including tablets and smartphones, are able to use PDF Zen without installing an app. The editor will automatically detect the user’s platform and display an appropriate interface. Owners of a PC or Mac who have Docudesk deskPDF software installed will be able to upload documents to the service with a single click.

PDF Zen has given us 500 coupon codes to help celebrate the launch of its new service. These codes will provide you with a 50% discount for fax bundles or the first month of your monthly plan. You can grab one from our rewards page.

Sorry, the competition is now over

MakeUseOf readers can also redeem points for a copy of deskPDF Creator, the company’s desktop PDF creation tool. Check out the rewards page for more information.

Source: Docudesk

The post Docudesk Announces Free Online PDF Editor + We Have 500 Coupon Codes! [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The alternative PDF readers run the gamut from minimal, lightweight applications built for nothing more than viewing PDFs to more full-featured applications that include annotations and highlighting. Some applications even include features you won’t find in Adobe Reader, such as easy creation of PDF documents and basic PDF-editing tools.

Built-In PDF Readers

If you’re using Google Chrome, you already have a PDF reader. It’s not feature-packed, but it’s a quick, minimal way to read PDF documents in your browser without installing and launching a separate application. It makes PDFs look like any other web page, aside from a toolbar that appears when you hover your cursor over the document.

Mozilla is working on integrating a built-in PDF reader, known as PDF.js, into Firefox 14, the next version of Firefox that will be released. Firefox should have a built-in PDF reader by Firefox 14 – or, hopefully, Firefox 15 at the latest. Windows 8 also comes with its own PDF reader – PDF readers are becoming more integrated into the browsers and operating systems we use every day, gradually eliminating the need for dedicated PDF readers.

Foxit Reader

Foxit may be one of the first names that comes to mind when people think about alternative PDF readers, as it was one of the first alternative PDF readers to gain steam – and it’s still a great option today. Unfortunately, it does try to install a toolbar and change your web browser’s home page during installation. Unlike some of the more lightweight option, Foxit has built-in support for annotations, highlights and other PDF-editing features – it’s a more full-featured alternative to Adobe Reader.

Sumatra PDF

Sumatra PDF stands out as the most lightweight PDF reader available. It’s very lightweight, has a simple interface, and is also available as a portable app that you can take with you anywhere. It doesn’t have any editing options or other advanced features – it’s just a window that loads extremely quickly and displays PDFs. It’s also packed with keyboard shortcuts, making it even more ideal for quickly reading PDFs. Sumatra also supports other types of files, including eBooks in ePub and Mobi format and comic books in CBZ and CBR formats.

Nitro PDF Reader

Nitro stands out among free PDF readers with some unique features, as well as a slick interface – although people that dislike Microsoft’s ribbon interface may prefer another application’s interface. It’s got some features you won’t find elsewhere – for example, its QuickSign feature allows you to capture a digital image of your signature and apply it to PDF documents. Nitro PDF can also convert files from Microsoft Word and other formats to PDF, convert PDF files to text, and extract images from PDF files. For a more in-depth look at Nitro PDF Reader, check out our full review.

PDF-XChange Viewer

PDF-XChange Viewer is a fast application, although it isn’t as lightweight as some of the other available PDF readers. It’s got good support for editing and annotations, although more complex edits will require a more full-featured, paid application like Adobe Acrobat. For more information about PDF-XChange Viewer, check out our full review.

Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader is still the standard PDF reader, although it’s definitely not the fastest. While most PDF documents work perfectly fine in other PDF readers, every now and then a document will only work in Adobe Reader. If you prefer another PDF reader, don’t be surprised if you have to occasionally fire up Adobe Reader to view a more complex PDF that just isn’t working properly in other PDF readers. There’s a reason Chrome’s in-browser PDF reader prompts users to open (or download) Adobe Reader in some cases.

For more great Windows software, check out our list of the 168 best free Windows applications.

How do you read PDFs on Windows? Leave a comment and tell us which PDF reader you prefer.

The post The 6 Best PDF Readers For Windows appeared first on MakeUseOf.

This week we’re giving away 25 copies of novaPDF Professional Desktop 7 worth a total of $1250! Read on for your chance to enter our giveaway and win your own copy!

File Conversion & Office Integration

While novaPDF installs itself as a virtual printer, there are also other ways to use it. You can launch the novaPDF application to load a file from your computer and directly convert it to PDF. You can also use the included Microsoft Office add-in – just click the novaPDF tab on the ribbon and use the Save as PDF button.

Creating a PDF From Any Application

Open any application’s Print window and you’ll see novaPDF available as one of your printers. You can even make it your default printer.

Print with the novaPDF printer and you’ll see the novaPDF save dialog, which allows you to adjust your settings. By default, novaPDF will create a new PDF file and open it with your default PDF viewer afterwards. From here, you can also have novaPDF add your document to the beginning or end of an existing PDF file, apply a password to the PDF file, or send the PDF file via email — the PDF can be send via email automatically or attached to an email in the system’s default email client. You can also click the PDF/A-1b check box to create a PDF/A file. PDF/A is a PDF standard designed for long-term archiving – for example, it embeds fonts rather than linking to them on the system and doesn’t allow passwords that may impede viewing in the future.

Click the Change Options button to adjust settings for the current PDF print operation. You can set the title, subject, author, and keywords – particularly useful if you’re posting the PDF online, as these fields will be indexed by search engines. You can also change the default options PDF viewers will use when they open your PDF file – for example, you can have the PDF automatically open on a specific page. The other tabs allow you to change the graphics compression settings and the email server that will be used when sending the PDF by email.

On the Security tab, you’ll find encryption, password, and permission settings. The permissions check box lets you control whether users can print, modify, and perform other actions with the PDF. You can set different user and owner passwords – when someone opens the PDF with the user password, they won’t be able to adjust the document permissions.

NovaPDF ships with an informative help system, so you can always click the Help button if you’re not sure what an option does. The help system provides in-depth explanations of each option.

Printing Preferences

NovaPDF also has many more options than appear in its default save dialog. To access more novaPDF options, click the Preferences button in the print dialog.

You’ll find a dialog with a variety of tabs for every possible type of PDF option you’d ever want to configure in novaPDF’s print preferences window. You can adjust settings for page sizes, font-embedding, and a wide variety of other options. NovaPDF attempts to automatically detect and create links and bookmarks – you can customize that behavior here, too. You can also automatically apply a watermark or overlay to created PDFs. If you don’t like the save dialog that appears every time you create a PDF with novaPDF, you can define your settings and set novaPDF to automatically create PDFs without prompting you.

NovaPDF can also sign each PDF document you create with a digital signature. This allows others to verify that the document is authentic – they’ll know you created it and that it hasn’t been modified after creation. This can be particularly important for professional communications.

NovaPDF also includes support for profiles. If you have different groups of settings you want to use, you can create a profile for each. NovaPDF can also show a Select Profile dialog while printing, so you can quickly choose groups of settings without the hassle of adjusting settings back and forth or toggling between profiles in the preferences dialog.

You can download a trial version of novaPDF Desktop Professional to test it out for yourself. The trial version doesn’t have a time limit and includes all the features of the full version, but it adds a notice to the footer of each page. To create PDFs without this notice, you’ll have to buy a copy ($49) – or win one in our giveaway! This week we’re giving away 25 copies of novaPDF Professional Desktop worth a total of $1250!

How do I win a copy of novaPDF Desktop Professional 7?

It’s simple, just follow the instructions. Please note that we’ve included a new entry method which utilises your MakeUseOf points.

Step 1: Fill in the giveaway form

Please fill in the form with your real name and email address so that we can get in touch if you are chosen as a winner. Click here if you can’t view the form.

The giveaway code required to activate the form is available from our Facebook page, our Twitter stream and Google+ page.

Step 2: Share!

You’re almost done. Now, all that’s left to do is to share the post!

Alternative entry method: Use your points!

If you don’t have a Facebook, Twitter or Google+ account, you may exchange your MakeUseOf points for an entry into the competition. It’s really simple: create a MakeUseOf account, earn points and exchange your points for an entry! Learn more about our Game system and Rewards program.

Sorry, the competition is now over

This giveaway begins now and ends Friday, June 29th. The winners will be selected at random and informed via email.

Spread the word to your friends and have fun!

Interested in sponsoring a giveaway? We’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us via the form at the bottom of this page.

The post Create PDFs With Advanced Features From Any Application with novaPDF Desktop Professional [Giveaway] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

But even though PDF’s are often destined for print, the fact is they are just as often distributed digitally. More often than not, this means you end up with a double-paged document on your computer, or your tablet. When you reach this point, you’re no longer minimizing your digital footprint. It’s not smart or economical, either. It’s just unwieldy.

What This Will Accomplish

This article will show you how to split your double-printed PDF pages on Mac OS X, making them more readable and portable. Most importantly, you’ll be able to keep in-line text, formatting and images, using only free tools.

The Tools Of The Trade

There are two prerequisite applications for this tutorial. The first, Preview, should already be present on our Mac.

We’ll also need a nifty tool called PDF Sam. You can download it for free from the website. Once you’ve installed it on your Mac, we’re good to go.

1. Duplicate & Crop

In this first step, we’ll be separating what will eventually be our odd and even numbered pages. Before you do anything else, duplicate the PDF document. You can call one of the documents ‘even-pages’ and the other ‘odd-pages’.

Open the ‘odd-pages’ document, and select the portion of the page you’d like to separate. Use the zoom function and the selection handles to optimize your selection, and make sure not to select any abundant whitespace.

Open the thumbnail tray from View -> Thumbnails, click on one of the pages’ thumbnails, and select all with cmd + a, or Edit -> Select All. Finally, press cmd + k, or use Tools -> Crop to crop the entire PDF around your selection, and save the file.

Now, open the ‘even-pages’ file, and go through the same steps. However, this time crop around the other section of the page. In the end you should have two PDF files; one with the odd numbered pages, and the other with the even numbered pages of our future document.

2. Merge Odd & Even Pages

Fire up PDF Sam. In the left sidebar of the application, select ‘Alternate Mix‘ in the list of plugins. Next, add the two PDF’s you created in the previous step to the application, with the ‘odd-pages’ PDF first, followed by the ‘even-pages’. Make sure the ‘Mix options‘ are both left unchecked, select a target output file, and hit run.

This step will merge the two PDF’s, alternating between pages of the two input files. The end result is a single PDF with the double-printed portions neatly separated.

3. Make The Crop Permanent (Optional)

Because of the way cropping PDF’s works in Preview and a lot of similar pages, the content you cropped away is not really gone. Rather, it’s just out of sight beyond the document’s borders. In most cases, you can use the document you just generated as is. However, documents that are cropped this way contain a lot of duplicated content, so can be double the file size.

Using a PDF printer is the easiest way to get rid of this duplicated content, radically decrease the document file size and make the crop permanent.

With your file open in Preview, go to File -> Print. A third-party PDF printer application may give you the luxury of dynamic page sizes, but we’ll have to create a paper size that matches our document. To do this, select Paper Size -> Manage Custom Sizes, and create a new profile. For presentation slides, the profile visible in the above screenshot (with a 4:3 aspect ratio) works like a charm. Make sure to empty all the ‘non-printable area’ boxes.

Finally, with your custom paper size added and selected, go to PDF -> Save as PDF… in the bottom left of the print dialog.

Did you experience any problems with this tutorial? Do you know any other worthwhile workarounds? Let us know in the article comments.

The post How To Split Double Paged Or Double Columned PDF Files [Mac] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

While this is all great, there’s no guarantee that your destination will accept images or that your scanner can spit out what it reads in PDF format. So what do you do when you need a PDF but your scanner and the software that comes with it only gives you images?

About and Installation

Hexonic ScanToPDF can take care of those problems quickly and easily. The great thing about this program is that it almost does a direct conversion from an image format to a PDF. You can download the program by following this link, and installation is about as basic as possible.

You do need to be aware, though, that the installer will try to install some spyware which “follows celebrities”, so I’d recommend that you choose to decline the EULA for that specific portion of the installer. The rest of the program will install just fine.

Getting Started

When you open the application, you’ll notice that the program follows the Ribbon UI, so it’ll already feel similar to other applications with the Ribbon UI such as Microsoft Office. To get started, you can choose between two options: convert images that are saved on your hard drive, or take an image directly from the scanner and convert that into a PDF.

Home Tab

To convert an existing image, you’ll need to click on Open and choose the file, or you can also drag and drop the file into the program. To convert an image that the scanner will send to the computer, you need to click on Select Scan Device and choose your scanner.

Once you have all the images you want to convert, you can manipulate it all by either moving images to the front or back, choose whether all images made up a single PDF or if each image will be its own PDF, as well as buttons for rotating images.

Page Layout Tab

You can also change properties about the PDF’s pages, including the size, background color, orientation, and DPI. Even more, you can change the final image quality or overall document size in kilobytes, page margins, rows, and columns. Tthere are no areas where hidden settings exist specifically for the application. Instead, all possible settings are openly displayed and affect what the program does with the images you supply it to create the PDFs you want.

PDF Options

Once you’ve set everything to exactly what you want, you’ll need to click on Select Path to choose where you’d like to save your PDF file(s). Then you can go ahead and click on Generate PDF back in the Page Layout tab to create and save the new PDF file(s) to your computer.

Conclusion

Hexonic ScanToPDF is a very handy tool for converting images to PDFs. It has a good amount of functionality so that it can be as flexible as you need it to be. Additionally, although it’s meant to be used alongside scanners, it can also work well with any images, so a scanner is not required to use this program. I have no doubt that you’ll make good use of this program.

Will you use Hexonic ScanToPDF? What have you been using until now for your image to PDF conversion jobs? Let us know in the comments!

The post Convert Images Into PDFs With Hexonic ScanToPDF [Windows] appeared first on MakeUseOf.

The universal cross-platform desktop version of Adobe Reader has been an industry standard for quite some time, but with the mobile version Adobe has basically been playing catch-up until now. Much of the user interface is pretty intuitive, allowing you three different ways to “turn pages,” and making most of the annotation tools available by pressing down and dragging over selected text, as well as accessing them in menu bar of the app. The Reader also includes a document search feature.

In addition to the highlighting tool, Adobe Reader contains strikethrough, underlining, freehand drawing, and sticky note tools. Documents, including your annotations, can be shared via email and printed wirelessly with AirPrint. You can also send PDF files to other apps like Apple’s iBooks, Kindle, DropCopy. Surprisingly, although you can import PDFs from Dropbox into the Reader, you can’t export them to the cloud service.

The signature feature is functional, providing a large window for writing, and saving, your signature with your finger or stylus pen, and then moving it around on a page anywhere you like.

Adobe Reader is a free app and is compatible with iPhone 3GS and above, the 4th generation iPod touch, and the iPad.

Source: Macworld

The post Adobe Releases Mobile PDF Reader Update For iOS [Updates] appeared first on MakeUseOf.