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AJAX World - Two Great PDF Creators

Do you want to turn all you documents/bills/photos into PDF files?

I like reading stuff in the pdf format.  But it’s even better if you can easily create pdf files. By easily I mean a button click. Literally.Since I have Adobe Acrobat, my Microsoft Word and PowerPoint just have an extra menu to create it. But it’s kinda boring. Let me share with you a couple of better ways.

1.    Last year I purchased a USB device from Fujitsu called ScanSnap S510. It’s one of the coolest widgets I have. Just put any sheet of paper, single or double sided, a photo, color or black and white. Press a large green button, and select a directory where to save your  pdf file.

2.    Last week I got to know an Internet service that allows to converts most of the files and Web site into a pdf file. Just go to PDF Converter's site and select a file or a Web site, and in several seconds you’ll get it as a PDF.  This is a software as service deal. If you do not want to pay for it, you’ll have a very modest limitation – one conversion per 30 minutes. But if you are an established person or business, pay several bucks a month an do as many conversions as you like. An interesting thing that I noticed is that this software produces smaller pdf files than Adobe’s original converter.  It can convert into pdf lots and lots of file formats (yes it knows how to work with your Excel spreadsheets too).

I have only minor complain  - if a Web page has Flash Player parts, you’ll see empty rectangles there. But creators of the PDF converter ensured me that SWF conversion will be complete too in a months or so. But overall, this is a really handy tool.

Needless to say that PDF docs look a lot more professionally than essays  written in MS Word or Notepad.

How do you present your documents? Do you think they look OK without converting them to PDF? Big mistake.Huge.

About Yakov Fain

Yakov Fain is a Managing Director of Farata Systems, consulting, training and product company. He has authored several Java books, dozens of technical articles. SYS-CON Books released his latest co-authored book , Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters in Spring 2007. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Yakov with the title Java Champion. He leads the Princeton Java Users Group. He is an Adobe Certified Flex Instructor. Currently Yakov works on the book for O'Reilly "Enterprise Application Development with Flex". He twits at twitter.com/yfain.

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Most Recent Comments
Yakov 05/25/08 04:30:02 PM EDT

ScanSnap comes with special image-recognition software that I have not even try. I am a point-and-shoot type of guy :)

Michael Jahn 05/17/08 11:23:17 AM EDT

related to the snapscan - are their an samples of the results we might examine ? Are their any image processing options available (deskew, despeckle, thershold, descreen, border edge removal, etc...)

yossi shoham 05/14/08 11:00:21 AM EDT

http://www.alivepdf.org/

Highly recommended

For developing PDF in Flex