PDF musings

Having been working a lot with PDFs lately and thought I'd share a few tips.

1. Try Infix for editing

If you find yourself editing PDF files a lot and don't have the hugely overpriced Adobe Acrobat installed, I've found Infix really handy. I have a lot of scans of articles,  book chapters and so on and often need to edit them (reverse page order, delete/add pages, crop, ...). Have found this application powerful and user-friendly. 

There's a free version (which is fully enabled, but adds a small watermark to the bottom of the 1st page) and, of course, a premium version.

There are more and more competing PDF tools out there, but so far I haven't come across anything cheaper (much less free) that has the same feature set and ease of use. (And if you can live with the little watermark--which can be removed later--then it doesn't have to cost you anything.)

2. Ditch Adobe Reader

Adobe Reader is a slow, bloated program that runs in the background all the time under the pretext of keeping itself updated. It slows down your system and nags you needlessly about silly add-ons that have nothing to do with its purpose. 

The slim and totally free Foxit Reader plugin is a big improvement in terms of speed and resource consumption, which it has taken the Web by storm. For most people, there's little reason to keep using Adobe Reader.

3. Use PDF995 to generate PDFs

If you're looking for a free way to generate PDFs, there's a free, ad-supported alternative product that in my experience works just as well as Adobe Distiller. It's called PDF995.

Comments

[Tim]

Thanks. BullZip's also a nice PDF generator, while Serif PagePlus allows you to import and edit most PDFs like ordianary DTP files.

[Ikram Kurdi]

I moved to Foxit for a while, until I realized I couldn't change the background color of the program (the color to the right and left of the pages), so I moved back to Adobe. I like the color to be dark gray.

I simply deleted the silly Adobe Update exe to get rid of it.

For generating PDFs I use PrimoPDF, it work in MS Word and it works great for Arabic PDF's.