Difference between revisions of "MIT PDF--Conversion Galore"

Revision as of 09:26, 14 October 2015

PDF, the portable document format

• Everything you ever wanted to know about PDF.
  • created to get away from all the dependencies of different operating systems and word processing applications.
    • Takeaway: There are many versions of the PDF format; not all PDF documents will behave the same.

PDF Trivia

• Created by Adobe Systems in 1993
• Submitted to ISO as a standard in 2008 --ISO 32000-1

PDF, the software world

• List of PDF Software

PDF, the basics

Exercise I

Creating PDF's

MS Word, convert to PDF

• Look at options

Exercise II

editing an existing PDF

Exercise III

Merging multiple documents

• With Adobe Acrobat Professional
  • Combine Files --> Add Files --> Preview --> Arrange Pages / Delete Pages --> Combine files
• With Microsoft Word
  • INSERT --> Object --> Text from file
    • Can be any text file format {pdf, docx, otd, txt}

Viewing

Desktop Applications

• View in a browser {Chrome, Firefox}, have native ability to read PDF, the simplest, but not the most reliable, nor the fastest.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader now deceased? Now it's Adobe Acrobat DC
• For Windows, SumatraPDF is the best <-- That's a matter of quantitative fact
• For Macintosh, I have no idea
• For GNU/Linux, Evince

Mobile Applications

• Android: Document Viewer, on F-Droid Repo, on Google Play
• Android: Google PDF viewer
• Android: Adobe Acrobat Reader on Google Play
• IOS: ?

Export as

Most applications have an ability to export as a PDF document:

• MS Excel
• MS Word
• MS PowerPoint
• Libre Office Writer
• Libre Office Calc
• Libre Office Presentation
• Google Sheets
• Google Doc
• Google Slides

Edit (Import)

as text

• Adobe Acrobat Reader
• Microsoft Word
• Libre Office Writer

as graphic

• Inkscape
• Libre Office Draw
• GIMP
• Adobe Photoshop

Merging

• Adobe Acrobat Professional
• PDFSaM (Split and Merge)

Shout out to DuckDuckGo search engine for bursting my filter bubble