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WordPerfect Office X4 adds PDF editing capabilities

WordPerfect Office has maintained a small following over the years that has allowed it to provide an alternative to MS Office. The two office suites were by and large very similar and offered very similar applications and sets of functionality. The latest version of WordPerfect Office is bringing something new to the table that is nowhere to be found in MS Office. WordPerfect Office will not only have support of Office Open XML and Open Document Format but PDF as well. Users will be able to open and edit PDF files.

A PDF is actually imported in the WordPerfect using built-in OCR technology and can then be exported to PDF when editing is finished.

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PDF/A Conference (Amsterdam) highlights

Some time ago I posted information about the PDF/A Conference that was being held in Amsterdam in April. The conference was sponsored by the PDF/A Competence Center and covered a wide range of topics both about existing usage of PDF/A and the future developments underway.

Greg Manuel attended the conference and has provided some notes on the sessions he attended during the conference. The fact that there appeared to a growing number of questions as well as needs for additional changes in the specification only highlight the growing use of PDF/A as the document archiving standard format.

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convert office documents (doc xls) to pdf

Found another forum where a developer is asking the age old question of how to convert MS Office documents to PDF. Recently Microsoft released the format specifications for MS Office documents and many thought that would make it conversion easier. Soon after the Ghent Working Group released a set of specifications designed to help develop a conversion solution. As of yet there hasn’t appeared a commercial or open source application that has implemented a new solution based on this information. That leaves us with the previous solutions that are still available. I am most familiar with PDF JobReady that provides conversion of documents to PDF from most desktop applications.

PDF JobReady has a client that installs as a print driver. The print driver utilizes the creating application and Adobe PDF technology to convert the document to postscript. Adobe Distiller technology is then used to convert the postscript file to PDF. This multi-step process is still the only way that a high quality PDF can be consistently created from a file originally created using a desktop publishing application. There is much more to JobReady than is mentioned here and information about that is available in the links section.

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Yudu Freedom hosts your PDFs, makes them SEO friendly

We seem to be seeing another burst of the websites popping up that are taking advantage of the latest improvements in website technology and Yudu would qualify as that. They have also added some intelligence to their site that allows it to index an uploaded PDF so that it is more friendly to search engines as they spider a site.

Previously non-HTML content on a website was penalized in search rankings if it was included at all by search engines. PDF as an open standard is much more amenable to being indexed and as the popularity of the format has grown the search engines have stopped penalizing PDF content as long as it can be cleanly indexed. That is where Yudu comes into the picture.

The author of this article makes mention of a competing site called Scribd. Scribd provides a wider range of services and supports other file types but they are lacking the SEO optimization feature that sets Yudu apart. If you have PDF and want it to be found and searched by Google and others then Yudu would seem to be the better choice.

Lastly, after some research there is a way to help insure your PDF documents are searchable by search engines and you can find the work around on the Scribd Google Groups site. It requires some preprocessing of your PDF before you upload it to Scribd and there seems to be a bit of discussion on whether search engines would consider the work around to be black hat SEO hacking.

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Ghent PDF Workgroup Releases Proof of Preflight specification

The Ghent Working Group, GWG, has been releasing workflow specifications for PDF creation and processing for some time now. These latest specifications have been very interesting. The previous release dealth with conversion of MS Office documents to PDF. The latest is a best practices specification that allows you to review the preflight activities that have been performed on the PDF.

If you receive a PDF that has been preflighted and those activities have been documented and digitally signed according to this specification then you will not have to doubt the condition of the PDF. The specific preflight specification can been tracked and you can be assured that the PDF is compliant with the correct PDF standard(ie PDF/X1-a, PDF/X-3, etc).

As these best practices are released and implemented by organizations the cost of pre-press processing will be lowered. Also this will lowered the number of times that redundant preflighting will have to take place for each PDF and thus lowering the overall cost of handling the document. Questions always arise as to why organizations are moving more and more of their documents to PDF. When compared to other less robust formats you can see how the cost savings achieved from lower processing effort alone make PDF attractive.

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PC boards produced from PDF files – Dataweek

This story comes to us from South Africa. An engineer, James Chalmers, visited the US for some mathematical training a few years ago and when arriving back home he set to work on developing a new way to produce PC circuit boards. During that time the PDF specification was upgraded to support representation of 3D schematics. Now Mr. Chalmers has announced a new process that allows a customer to email a PDF and very shortly have a complete board printed and ready in under an hour.

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Amex woes highlight common PDF accessibility problem

At first glance this article would seem to be a knock on PDF and it is rather sad that the author chose to word his title and opening paragraph in such a way as to blame a file format for the bad programming practices of certain website developers. The truly important and useful part of this article is most of the way through the opening blather.

PDF is not why the AMEX website suddenly became jibberish to the automated screen reader technology. The website developers didn’t bother to insure that the PDF was tagged correctly so the screen reader could interpret the data correctly. The same problem would have occurred if the developers has failed to correctly tag the previously used HTML data. There are usually two ways of writing software; the way that is easier for the developer and the way that will make it easier on the user. Guess which way the developers of the AMEX site chose.

This example does show the importance of understanding a much more complex and robust format like PDF when you make a migration such as this. There are a few links to helpful information about accessibility considerations included in the article as well.

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Comparison of Free PDF Software

This is a quick run down of the more popular free PDF conversion software that is available today. This comparo does provide more information than just what each one of these tools can do. First the fact that there is such a market for PDF conversion tools makes it clear PDF only continues to gain momentum as the dominant file format available today. Secondly, a quick glance down the list shows that there is a good reason these tools are free. None of them provide complete coverage of the PDF Specification. If you need to convert a document for personal or limited use then these tools can be helpful. If, on the other hand, you want to create PDF documents that are completely compliant with the entire PDF specification or actually create PDF documents that adhere to a particular sub-spec, i.e. PDF/A or PDF/X, then you need to purchase a software tool that will do the job and not a freebie. Lastly, you will notice that despite the plethora of freebie PDF viewers on the market it is Adobe Reader that is used to determine the quality of the PDF files created by these tools.

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Digital Arts – Blogs -Preview’s hidden powers

I’ve talked about the built-in capability to handle PDF on Mac previously but this article provides a very thorough look at everything that is possible with Apple Preview for PDF. It does much more than the name implies.

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