Software Free

The International Organization for Standardization has approved Adobe Systems' widely used PDF (Portable Document Format) as an international standard, and is now in charge of any changes made to the specification.

Windows/Mac/Linux (Firefox): The makers of the previously-posted PDF Download extension have released a 2.0 beta that adds some key features, including a full web-to-PDF converter that retains CSS...

Windows only: Freeware PDF Unlocker, a free Windows utility, doesn't do everything that commerical packages like those from Elcomsoft do, but it will help if you just need to unlock copy/paste and...

Need some fresh e-reading material for your commute, but all out of e-books? Feedbook, a free RSS aggregator, takes in RSS feeds and spits out compiled PDFs in formats for pretty much any e-reader...

You can't edit them yet, but Google Docs users can now upload PDF documents and view, copy text from, print, and share them. Nice solution when you don't have a reader handy, or when PDFs are part of...

OOXML backwards compatibility led Microsoft to ODF | Tech News on ZDNet

Whatever the reason might be, Native support for ODF in MS Office will help the Format grow! I'll be able to create and edit my documents in Open Office while my clients who insist on using MS Office can view and edit them there :D

This will help Open Office adoption also grow rapidly!

And while talking about that I have heard that Oo.org 3.0 will support PDF editing also, is that confirmed???   Blogged with the Flock Browser

Have a pesky file sent to you in email or downloaded off the web and can't seem to open the darn thing because someone managed to password protect it and not notify you what that password is? No sweat, here's several ways to unlock password protected compressed files and pdf's.

Peter Murray-Rust is one of the key figures in the world of open data and open science, and deserves a lot of the credit for making these issues more visible. Here's an interesting post in which he points out that PDF files are not ideal from an archiving viewpoint:

I should make it clear that I am not religiously opposed to PDF, just to the present incarnation of PDF and the mindset that it engenders in publishers, repositarians, and readers. (Authors generally do not use PDF).

He then discusses in detail what the problems are and what solutions might be. Then he drops this clanger:

I’m not asking for XML. I’m asking for either XHTML or Word (or OOXML)

Word? OOXML??? Come on, Peter, you want open formats and you're willing to accept one of the most botched "standards" around, knocked up for purely political reasons, that includes gobs of proprietary elements and is probably impossible for anyone other than Microsoft to implement? *That's* open? I don't think so....

Walk by most office's shared network printer and chances are you'll see a stack of discarded extra pages the person who printed them didn't need after all, or print jobs that were so "important" they...

David Allen, author of Getting Things Done and inspiration for a lot of posts 'round these parts, gives away a free four-page PDF at his website that covers his basic principals for keeping email...

Normally we leave gadget reviews to the crazy cats over at Gizmodo, but when reader Pete Riley told us he's "totally hooked" on Amazon's new reading device Kindle because of its time-saving...

So you can make PDFs from OpenOffice.org documents. Excellent. What if you've got a PDF already that you didn't create, and you want it in a format like this?

Stephen Abrams linked to from David Rothman  writes about BookletCreator, a free tool that lets you  create booklets from PDF files. It reorders pages so that after printing and folding the pages you get a small book.

Btw, I've got an upcoming blog on how to create booklets from Writer documents. It's scheduled down the line a week or two.

The Knoppix Live Linux CD can do more than just rescue files from an unbootable hard drive—the full operating system on an optical disk has a host of software packages including multimedia...

Previously mentioned document sharing application Scribd has updated its embeddable document reader to iPaper, a fast, efficient tool for embedding any document, from PDFs to PowerPoint to Word...

If you use Google Calendar, chances are you've ignored the little "Print" button on the left side of the tabs at the top. It just pops a print dialog box, right? Wrong! Hit that Print link to...