Posted Jul 2nd 2008 5:00PM by Mat Lu Filed under: Software
Adobe has released version 9 of its Adobe Reader PDF display software. The newest version includes a number of changes including faster launching, "PDF Portfolios" (bundles of PDFs and other document types), native Flash support, and support for the online Acrobat.com beta (through Adobe AIR) with a variety of online PDF services.
Adobe Reader 9 is a free download from Adobe and is platform (Intel/PPC) specific.
If you switched to Firefox from another browser like Safari that supports in-line PDF viewing (that's the ablity to look at a PDF in the browser instead of downloading it), then you might have been disheartened to learn that Firefox does not support this feature natively. However, you will find Firefox-Mac-PDF to be a useful plug-in.
Firefox-Mac-PDF allows for the same in-line PDF viewing that can be found in Safari. This plug-in requires Firefox 3 and Mac OS X 10.4 (Tiger) or higher. You can download the plug-in for free from their Google Code page.
To install the plug-in, just open the Add-ons panel by going to Tools > Add-ons. Once there, drag the downloaded ".xpi" file to the Add-ons. You will be asked if you wish to install the plug-in. Once you restart Firefox you'll be able to view all PDFs right within Firefox.
Some of you news hounds may be aware of Newseum, the "interactive museum of news." Every day, they publish the front pages of over 600 newspapers from several companies. Wouldn't it be cool to get just the ones you like delivered to your (virtual) door as a single PDF? Automator to the rescue!
Dave Bednarski sent a great script he wrote to the folks at 37signals which serves that purpose. Basically, you enter the addresses of the papers you'd like to receive, filter for PDFs, download the result to the desktop and combine the lot by appending the pages into one big file. It's just that easy.
For an added bonus, attach this script to an iCal event and have your news waiting for you each morning. All that's missing is your mug of coffee, and the muddy pawprints of the family dog on the carpet after he runs out in the rain to chase the paperboy.
Apple has an interesting video tip up this week on reducing the file size of graphic intensive PDFs created from the Print dialog. In their example they make a PDF from a Keynote presentation containing lots of graphics, and substantially reduce its size by selecting the "Reduce File Size" Quartz filter in the ColorSync options of the Print Dialog before choosing "Save as PDF..." from the PDF drop-down menu. In their example, without the filter the resulting PDF is 5.3MB and with the filter it's only 632KB. So I thought I'd give it a try on some of my own documents. But then I ran into a problem.
The Print dialog ColorSync access to Quartz filters has disappeared in Leopard. The video tip was made with Tiger; it seems a little bit ironic that they would release it now with a feature that is no longer available in Leopard. However, digging around a little bit I discovered a work-around. The Quartz filters are still available on the Save dialog box in the Preview application (above). So to achieve the same effect when you're in the Print dialog instead of choosing "Save as PDF..." from the drop down menu rather hit the "Preview" button, which opens the PDF in the Preview application. You can now "Save as..." and when you do the Quartz filter drop-down menu will appear, including the "Reduce File Size" filter. Give it a name and save it and you'll have your smaller PDF.
In my own testing using the "Reduce File Size" filter did noticeably degrade the quality of images in the PDF, but the file size savings were significant as well. It would actually be nice if there were more granularity so you could have some control over the compromise between file size and image quality. Nonetheless, if you have to shrink a graphics intensive PDF for emailing, etc. this can be a handy tip.
Leap is a new Finder replacement from Ironic Software that eschews traditional directory structures in favor of search and tagging. The software is pretty smart, and groups together common file types so you can find what you're looking for in a hurry. It also allows you to add your own tags to files, and creates a 'tag cloud' that outlines what kind of files you're looking at, what folders those files are in, and what user created tags they possess. The larger the label, the more files are tagged with that (as you can see in the screenshot above I have lots of image files on my Desktop).
The iPhoto-like UI is easy to use, and really shines when the Loupe is used. The Loupe is a tool that lets you peek at the contents of supported file types without launching any additional apps. Leap is in Beta, and the Loupe's performance makes that clear. It was a little slow, and sometimes lagged when I pointed my mouse from file to file.
In addition to all its Finder abilities, you can use Leap as a replacement for Apple's built in Spotlight interface, and yes the tag cloud is right there with your Spotlight results.
Take a look at this demo movie to get a better idea of what Leap can do for you.
Leap is currently in beta, and pricing has not been announced. You will get a free license, though, if you buy Yep, a PDF organizer that Ironic sells for $34, now.
Since we last mentioned the Skim PDF reader and annotating application it has grown considerably and the newly released version 0.7 adds bevy of new features. Since that early release back in April they've added considerably to the markup and searching tools (including live search of the document with context in addition to searching just the annotations). There's also greatly expanded AppleScript support and a presentation mode. The crazy keyboard shortcut system we complained about before has also been simplified and improved. In short, Skim is getting better by leaps and bounds and is definitely worth another look if you regularly need to read and markup PDFs. While you can still only highlight PDFs with selectable text (i.e. PDFs that are not just scans), the anchored note and box features make marking up even image PDFs easier.
Skim remains open source and thus a free download from SourceForge.
Earlier today, I learned about this iPhone screen shot snippet meant to be used inside an application. It produces PDF results. After playing with the code and realizing it probably couldn't be expanded to a general purpose screenshot utility, I decided to write one from scratch by taking advantage of UIApplication's _dumpScreenContents: protocol.
My screenshot utility, which you can download here runs from the command line and produces a PNG output of your screen. I look forward to using this tool. It's certainly going to be a lot easier than trying to light the iPhone correctly and avoid reflections while snapping pictures with a digital camera.
Update: My daughter figured out that if you set the iPhone to never sleep and put it into camera mode, you can script it to take screen shots every minute (or five minutes or however long) to take time lapse series of images. We are so going to try this out.
Update 2: Tried it out. Only gets about 4 pictures per minute when in a loop so video is a no-go.
The title explains it all: Revealed in Apple's new iPhone Guided Tour video is the swanky handset's previously-unknown ability to read Word, Excel, and PDF document e-mail attachments. This alleviates fears to the contrary, and will sure be useful for those business-types On The Go eager for their quarterly profit reports and sweet pie charts and whatnot. But without actual editing capabilities, those business-y people still have something to complain about.
Then again, does anybody actually edit Word/Excel documents on their BlackBerry? (Serious question.)
TUAW reader Jakob writes that he often uses OS X's "Print as PDF" feature. He asks if there's a way to print only part of a website by dragging out a selection rectangle?
Yes, Jakob, there's a very simple way. Yesterday, I posted a Terminal Tip about using OS X's built in command-line screencapture utility. What I didn't mention in that post was that screencapture allows you to grab your shots in PDF format. To use the mouse to capture a rectangle from the screen and then save it to PDF, just issue a command along the following lines:
% screencapture -i -s -tpdf ~/Desktop/foo.pdf
And if you're not big on using Terminal and the Command line, here's another way to approach the problem with Grab. Launch Grab from Applications/Utilities and choose Capture -> Selection. Use the cross hairs to select part of the screen and then print the results to PDF (File -> Print, then PDF -> Save as PDF).
If you need to capture more data than a single screen will allow, consider Paparazzi. It's a donate-ware utility that allows you to enter a URL and a screen size. It loads the web page from the URL you provide and produces an image from that data--regardless of whether you'd have to scroll the screen to see the entire page in a normal web browser. No, it won't save to PDF, but it's pretty easy to convert the images if you have to. Update: The latest version of Paparazzi will save to PDF including searchable text.
In a follow-up message, Jakob mentioned that he's really interested in producing a searchable result. Sure you can save to a web archive but both web archives (use File -> Save as or File -> Save Page as or the equivalent in your favorite browser) and his current method of printing to PDF create pretty big files, even if they are searchable. So here's my final recommendation: invest in Acrobat, not just in Acrobat Reader. In Acrobat, use Document->Extract Pages to save only those portions of the web page you want to keep and delete the rest.
In a comment to our recent PDF review, Gary let us know about about Skim, a new open source project to produce a tool for reading and marking up PDFs. Skim already has a number of interesting tools, allowing you to:
embed notes (both shorter notes that appear over the PDF, and anchored notes which are marked by a speech bubble icon that leads to a separate window)
add circles and boxes
if the text in the PDF is selectable, highlight, strike-through, and underline.
Skim even has a full screen mode, as is popular with the kids these days. For a version 0.2 release there's already a lot of functionality here, which bodes well for the future (though I have to say the keyboard shortcuts for notes and markup are insane). Unlike Papers, which we mentioned before, Skim doesn't seem to be intended as a PDF library manager, but rather an individual PDF markup tool. It is available now as a free download from SourceForge.
In my professional life I deal with a lot of PDFs. In my research I'm constantly reading PDF versions of journal articles, and often I'm submitting articles of my own in PDF (though a distressing number of journals require Microsoft Word DOC submissions). I also often convert my students' papers to PDF for commenting, etc. All of this is to say, I'm always on the lookout for good tools to help me deal with PDFs. Of course the 900 pound gorilla of PDF tools is Adobe Acrobat ; unfortunately, it's priced accordingly (Acrobat Professional is $379.99 at Amazon). So I thought I would look at two much less expensive PDF tools on the Mac, to see how they stack up, and to decide which one I want to spend my own hard earned cash on. Our two candidates are PDFClerk (€30 or $40.50) from SintraWorks and PDFpen ($49.95 or $94.95 for Pro edition, educational pricing available) from SmileOnMyMac. Let's see how they compare.
Papers appears to be an interesting application for those in the scientific community who need to read and manage a large number of papers as PDFs. It integrates with the online NIH database PubMed for searching and downloading. It allows you to organize articles not only by title but by author and journal. It even includes a full screen reading mode. There is nice review over at Infinite Loop by Jonathan Gitlin discussing how Papers has improved his own researching workflow.
The idea behind Papers, basically an iTunes or iPhoto for PDF journal articles, is a really good one, but I really wish it could be expanded in several areas. First of all, it clearly needs to support more online bibliographic databases and journal archives. As a humanist, for instance, I'd love a front end for JSTOR and the Philosophers Index (though perhaps I should not hold my breath since the developer calls Papers: "your personal library of science"). Secondly, and more importantly, I'd like to see Papers or a similar application offer a robust system for highlighting, comments, annotations, cross-linking etc. That's what I really need: a good tool to help me read articles (including and especially saving my notes), not just allow me to organize them.
In any case, if you need to manage professional journal articles Papers looks like a good start, though I did run into some bugs. It is presently available as a "Public Preview" and can be downloaded from mekentosj.com. It will eventually sell for €19 (~$25). Thanks Tim!
There's a great tip on Lifehacker today about using iTunes as an organizational tool. We've all got lots of PDFs sitting around; some important, some not. Instead of burying them in a series of nested folders within your Documents folder, use iTunes.
Make playlists for your different categories (like "Taxes" or "Parenting Committee"), add your files and you're done! Drop the lot into a "PDFs" folder and you've got organized, search-able files in an application you've probably got running anyway.
If you want to take this a step further, follow the full tutorial at Lifehacker and create a PDF-only iTunes library.
DocumentWallet seems to be the latest in a new category of Mac applications, the PDF manager. Much like Yep (which we covered when it was called kip), DocumentWallet is an iPhoto-like application for keeping track of PDFs. In addition to its library functions, DocumentWallet allows you to scan document into its library with any TWAIN compliant scanner. One nice thing about DocumentWallet is that the PDFs are not stored in some sort of proprietary database, but in the file system (though the same is true of Yep). The maker of DocumentWallet also offers a very similar program called ReceiptWallet that does much the same thing, but focuses on saving receipts rather longer documents, and even includes some rudimentary math functions for keeping track of expenses. Like Yep, Yojimbo, and others, DocumentWallet also adds a convenient Save PDF to DocumentWalletoption to the PDF pane of the OS X Print Dialog.
DocumentWallet and Yep are very similar, but there are some differences, perhaps most importantly Yep's focus on tags and DocumentWallet's focus on categories. Which one works better for you will probably depend on how you work, though both are worth a look.
DocumentWallet and ReceiptWallet are $29.95 each (or $44.93 for both) and a 21-day demo of each is available.
Back in June, we told you about a downloadable "My Mac Won't Start!" quickguide in the PocketMod format, a teensy little 8-page book you can create, print and fold yourself. Even though nothing's cooler than info-origami, the Flash-based PocketMod creation tool was a little too clunky for Aaron Hillegass of Big Nerd Ranch.
Aaron infused the PocketMod process with some Cocoa mojo and the result is PagePacker, a slick little app that lets you quickly put together your own PocketMods from PDFs, images or pages from the DIYplanner.com template set. Throw a picture of your dog and a handy city map onto the back of your busy schedule and you're all set.
Adobe has released version 9 of its Adobe Reader PDF display software. The newest version includes a number of changes including faster launching, "PDF Portfolios" (bundles of PDFs and other document types), native Flash support, and support for the online Acrobat.com beta (through Adobe AIR) with a variety of online PDF services.
If you switched to Firefox from another browser like Safari that supports in-line PDF viewing (that's the ablity to look at a PDF in the browser instead of downloading it), then you might have been disheartened to learn that Firefox does not support this feature natively. However, you will find Firefox-Mac-PDF to be a useful plug-in. 
Some of you news hounds may be aware of Newseum, the "interactive museum of news." Every day, they publish the front pages of over 600 newspapers from several companies. Wouldn't it be cool to get just the ones you like delivered to your (virtual) door as a single PDF? Automator to the rescue!
Since we last mentioned the Skim PDF reader and annotating application it has grown considerably and the newly released version 0.7 adds bevy of new features. Since that early release back in April they've added considerably to the markup and searching tools (including live search of the document with context in addition to searching just the annotations). There's also greatly expanded AppleScript support and a presentation mode. The crazy keyboard shortcut system we complained about before has also been simplified and improved. In short, Skim is getting better by leaps and bounds and is definitely worth another look if you regularly need to read and markup PDFs. While you can still only highlight PDFs with selectable text (i.e. PDFs that are not just scans), the anchored note and box features make marking up even image PDFs easier. 
Earlier today, I learned about this iPhone screen shot snippet meant to be used inside an application. It produces PDF results. After playing with the code and realizing it probably couldn't be expanded to a general purpose screenshot utility, I decided to write one from scratch by taking advantage of UIApplication's _dumpScreenContents: protocol.
The title explains it all: Revealed in Apple's new iPhone Guided Tour video is the swanky handset's previously-unknown ability to read Word, Excel, and PDF document e-mail attachments. This alleviates fears to the contrary, and will sure be useful for those business-types On The Go eager for their quarterly profit reports and sweet pie charts and whatnot. But without actual editing capabilities, those business-y people still have something to complain about.
TUAW reader Jakob writes that he often uses OS X's "Print as PDF" feature. He asks if there's a way to print only part of a website by dragging out a selection rectangle? 
There's a great tip on Lifehacker today about using iTunes as an organizational tool. We've all got lots of PDFs sitting around; some important, some not. Instead of burying them in a series of nested folders within your Documents folder, use iTunes.
DocumentWallet seems to be the latest in a new category of Mac applications, the PDF manager. Much like Yep (which we covered when it was called kip), DocumentWallet is an iPhoto-like application for keeping track of PDFs. In addition to its library functions, DocumentWallet allows you to scan document into its library with any TWAIN compliant scanner. One nice thing about DocumentWallet is that the PDFs are not stored in some sort of proprietary database, but in the file system (though the same is true of Yep). The maker of DocumentWallet also offers a very similar program called ReceiptWallet that does much the same thing, but focuses on saving receipts rather longer documents, and even includes some rudimentary math functions for keeping track of expenses. Like Yep, Yojimbo, and others, DocumentWallet also adds a convenient Save PDF to DocumentWallet option to the PDF pane of the OS X Print Dialog. 
Back in June, we told you about a downloadable "My Mac Won't Start!" quickguide in the PocketMod format, a teensy little 8-page book you can create, print and fold yourself. Even though nothing's cooler than info-origami, the Flash-based PocketMod creation tool was a little too clunky for Aaron Hillegass of Big Nerd Ranch.
