PDF

First, we will look into the most popular PDF readers, and then we will discuss ways you can improve your PDF reading experience....

Whether you're running Windows, Mac OS X, Mac OS 7.5.3 or later, Linux, Solaris, AIX, HP-UX, OS/2, Symbian OS, Palm OS, or a Pocket PC, Adobe has a reader for your platform. (Different platforms are frequently at different versions and have d...

Icons and other pieces of applications are PDFs, the rendering system is tied closely to the data model used by PDFs, and any application that can print can also produce PDFs. Given this fondness for PDF, it makes sense that the Preview applica...

cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/) is an alternative to a number of Adobe products. At its heart is a PostScript processor, which also works on PDF files. PostScript is both an ancestor of PDF and a complement to it. PostScript is a programming langu...

These plug-ins are loaded when Acrobat starts up. You can speed up Acrobat startup and clean up its menus by telling Acrobat to load only the features you desire. One simple technique is to hold down the Shift key when launching Acroba...

If you use third-party or custom plug-ins [Hack #97], it can become essential to distinguish the "production workflow" Acrobat from the "plug-in beta testing" Acrobat from the "on-screen reading" Acrobat. We can do that. In the same d...

In Windows, you double-click to open a PDF in the default viewer. But what if you have a couple of different Acrobat profiles from [Hack #5] ? Or maybe you want a quick way to open a PDF inside your web browser [Hack #9] ? Add these file-...

Trying to copy data from a PDF, however, can be frustrating. The solution for Acrobat 6 and Adobe Reader users (on Windows, anyway) comes from an unlikely source: Acrobat 5. Figure 1-7. TAPS faithfully copying formatted text and tables ...

Unless they are tagged [Hack #34], they have no concept of paragraph, table, or column. This becomes a problem only when you must create a new document using material from an old document. Ideally, you would use the old document's source f...

Often, for instance, page 17 of a file contains a table I would like to consult as I read page 19, and Acrobat makes this difficult. Here are a couple ways to open one PDF document in many windows, as shown in Figure 1-9. These tricks work with...

It turns PDF pages at an adjustable pace. Acrobat and Reader already have a similar "slideshow" feature, but it works only when viewing PDFs in Full Screen mode. In Acrobat or Reader 6.0, also try the View Automatically Scroll featur...

But it never fails to surprise people that they've somehow managed to overlook the fact that you can hop into Full Screen mode (View Full Screen) and view these images and pages without all the clutter of anything else you happen to have o...

For example, a document that displays large tables of data might also provide the reader with a matching Excel spreadsheet to work with. PDF's file attachment feature is an open-ended mechanism for packing any electronic file into a PDF like ...

When I click a bookmark in Acrobat, shown in Figure 1-13, the document loses input focus. Pressing arrow keys or Page Up and Page Down has no effect on the document until I click the document page. That makes two clicks, and clicking two time...

In fact, it is not a passive view, but an interactive easel with features not available anywhere else. 1.15.1 Tune the Thumbnail View As you widen this pane, more thumbnails become visible and they organize themselves into rows and...