PDF Hacks - 100 Industrial Strength Guidelines and Tools by Sid Steward - Book Review

If you have ever downloaded free ebooks, product manuals, consumer guides, etc from the internet you are conscious of PDF files. These files owe a lot of their popularity to the reality that they can be read on any personal computer with the totally free Adobe reader. Also, most word processing programs have the capability of converting a document to PDF format with a mouse click. PDF is the acronym for Portable Document Format, a format produced by Adobe Systems for document exchange. I was a passive use until I picked up a copy of "PDF Hacks" by Sid Steward. This book truly opened by eyes to the various features of this tool.

The initial to interest me was PDFtk, or PDF Tool Kit. This is a set of command line tools available for both windows and linux. With PDFtk the user can select distinct pages of a document, rearrange them, combine with other books, and essentially create customized reference documents. As an example, I have the usual collection of ebooks on write-up writing. By combining my favorite pages from each, I had 1 handy reference source. I even added my own notes to many sections to tie the material together and document the hints and procedures I had discovered.

For some time I have been employing the free open source program Inkscape to create vector graphics. Inkscape has countless of the very same characteristics as Adobe Illustrator. Sid shows how to use pstoedit to create vector files and embed them in a document.

There is a section on adding internet style navigation to your PDF document. Buttons can be utilized to link to internet material. It is effortless to style these buttons to get away from the usual gray institutional searching buttons.

Hack #66 shows how to copy safeguard the PDF document you have developed. This is highly vital since of the ease with which documents are passed around on the web. It is quite frustrating to spend a lot of time and research creating a commercial product that has actual value for the reader only to discover that is becoming distributed by others as a totally free document.

I knew that Visual basic could be used to access and manipulate PDFs. What I didn't know but learned in Hack #95 was that I could do the very same thing with perl. Perl is cost-free, well documented, and has an extensive support community. There are lots of accessible perl modules to simplify the code for any project.

PDF Hacks is a amazing book. Grab a copy and begin creating your own books.