Jandy's Meanderings - Latest Comments in Jandy’s Meanderings » PDF rant

Re: Jandy’s Meanderings » PDF rant

Dad — Fri, 16 Feb 2007 17:46:19 -0000

I got a PDF at work of some forms that I wanted to not have to rekey, but could not get them out of the PDF. A guy in the next cube had REAL Acrobat, and he was able to open the document and save it as a Word doc, so I could copy and edit it. Saved hours. I think you need the REAL Acrobat. Bobber's idea of the student discount rings nice as well. Pastor J also has a bunch of experience with PDF's and I would guess that he doesn't want to print them off either.....

Re: Jandy’s Meanderings » PDF rant

Bobber — Thu, 15 Feb 2007 16:17:38 -0000

You know I am not really an expert on PDFs. Looking at the Acrobat 8 page, it says, "Use familiar commenting tools including a highlighter, sticky notes, pencil, strikethrough, and more. Also attach files from other applications inline as comments." Which sounds like what you need. Again, I suggest you go to your computer store (is there something on campus) and see if there is a student discount. There is a free trial download, I don't know if all the features will work with this but give it a shot and see.

Re: Jandy’s Meanderings » PDF rant

Jandy — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 17:44:17 -0000

See, that's the thing. I don't want to change the document. I want to annotate it. Which doesn't involve changing it, just adding an overlay of my own marks and notes. I know you're not a Microsoft person, but I've used Microsoft Reader for ebooks a bit, and you can highlight, add notes, bookmarks, all sorts of things, and they're saved in a separate folder, but associated with the document you're annotating (so you see them when you look at the ebook, but they aren't actually a part of it). This is so much better than the pure static PDF that you can't do anything but read, and I don't understand why PDFs, since they're so standard and ubiquitous, don't have this sort of functionality.

Thanks for the point about photocopies and OCR. I guess it probably goes on a journal-by-journal basis whether they use text-based or photo-based PDFs. And I have a feeling my school wouldn't understand why I don't just print things out like everyone else here does.

Re: Jandy’s Meanderings » PDF rant

Bobber — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 14:31:26 -0000

Yes, it does have to do with rights management. Since it is much harder to change the document, it is less of a worry that someone will plagiarize or outright steel it.

And you are correct that some PDF's are actually pages that have been photocopied. OCR would be possible but might have restrictions and also might require more proof reading since OCR is not always foolproof. Thus is would be a bit more expensive to create it I suppose.

You might want to see if you can get a copy of Acrobat Writer at a student rate. Although I think that some documents are locked up so that even this will have only limited capabilities. You should go to a computer store or maybe your schools CS department and see if you can get definitive answers for these things. Good luck!