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Richard Crocker
Planet PDF Editorial Director
Richard Crocker is a director, product designer and marketer at Nitro PDF Software, and first became involved with PDF back in the days of version 1.1 and Acrobat Exchange 2.0. He helped launch the Planet PDF site in 1998. Today you can keep up with more of Richard's writings via the PDF Blog and Planet eBook, the site dedicated to publishing classic literature as free eBooks.
Here's some other ways keep up with him.
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The suitability of PDF documents for onscreen viewing has been a controversial topic. In this tutorial, Richard Crocker argues that the negative perception of reading PDFs onscreen is largely due to the inconsistent quality of PDF files. Accordingly, his tutorial explains how to prepare PDF documents in order to optimize the onscreen viewing experience.
When a file is converted to PDF, it loses its meaning. On the surface all the information is there, and to your eyes it looks exactly the same, but underneath that, all the method, structure and intelligence used when designing the original document has been lost.† This forms the heart of the challenge faced when attempting to convert PDF files back to formats like DOC (Microsoft Word), RTF and HTML, and is not dissimilar to those faced when OCRing paper-based documents.
Being a regular Windows user, I've been lucky enough this week to get a first look at Adobe's new lightweight PDF and XHTML document viewer -- Adobe Digital Editions. We Windows users might have to wait far longer than Mac users for a new operating system, but we always win when it comes to getting access to more software titles sooner. But enough of my gloating.
Microsoft has just made its first PDF creation product available free for download from its web site, making good on its promise months ago to give the tools away. If you remember our original story, after much wrangling with Adobe, Microsoft backed down on providing the functionality inside its Microsoft Office 2007 range of products. Instead, it announced it would give them away free via download to any Microsoft Office 2007 user. Adobe had wanted Microsoft to charge for the software.
If you haven't heard yet, Google has just announced that a bunch of the books it has been scanning for its Google Books Library Program are now available for free download as PDFs. There's no doubt Google needs to be applauded for the idea, but the execution (i.e. the books they've produced) could definitely do with some work. The PDF books are difficult to download, large in size, of such low resolution they're difficult to read, cannot be searched, and do not allow the user to copy text from them. It's left me wondering what Google expects people to do with the books.
The interesting if not troubling thing I've found after using the Microsoft Office 2007 beta is that Adobe Acrobat's PDF creation tools are now well and truly hidden away and hard to find. This creates multiple problems for Adobe: less people will successfully create PDFs, and more people will be asking, "Where did my 'Create PDF' button go?" Adobe needs to develop a solution for previous versions of Acrobat before the new Microsoft Office is launched.
Planet PDF has published its first impressions of Acrobat 7.0. As with most major releases, new users are bound to get a little lost. If you're in need of a helping hand, why not spend some time taking our product tour of this important product suite.
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