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TRIS Teaching Resource Information Service

Newsletter

Issue 4

The TRIS - team at the Faculty of Sciences, University of Kent, Canterbury Funded by Challenge Fund, UELT

DF (portable document format) documents have achieved an enormous popularity over the years and for some good reasons. Usually the documents can be viewed directly in web-pages, the size of the documents is usually quite small and they can be viewed on different operating systems (Windows, Linux, Macs). Another big

advantage is that once a pdf-file has been created it is rather difficult to change it, which on one hand can be quite annoying when you find a typo in your document, on the other hand it can make the file safe from unwanted „modifications‟. The market leader for viewing pdf-documents has been Adobe Acrobat Reader for many years, but they allowed you only to view the documents (unless you paid a lot of money for additional services). You could not do anything else with your documents, for example make annotations to the document, add pages, highlight text etc. In this edition of the Teaching Resource Information Service newsletter we will discuss how to exactly do this and get more out of your pdf-documents.

Creating pdf-files If you use the Windows Office 2007 suite, then creating pdf-files is as simple as, well – creating a pdf-file. All you need to do is to save your word document as a pdf-file. Simply click on Save As then clikc on PDF or XPS.

The programme will take care of the rest and create your pdf-file within seconds. By the way – the guys from OpenOffice included this feature a few years ago, so really Microsoft Office is only doing what other (freeware!!) software have done for quite a while. You can create pdf-files from any Microsoft Office 2007 (or OpenOffice) programme, like Word, PowerPoint or Excel (or the corresponding programmes in OpenOffice).

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Viewing pdf-files Now you created your pdf-document, but obviously you need to be able to view those files. As mentioned earlier, most computers come with a pre-installed version of Adobe Acrobat Reader and hence will be able to open and display your pdf-documents. But this programme does not allow you to do anything with your document other than look at it. To get a little bit more functionality get the free(!) PDF XChange Viewer from http://www.docu-track.com/home/prod_user/PDF-XChange_Tools/pdfx_viewer:

Just click on the “Download Now” button, download the PDFXVwer.zip file to your hard disk and extract the files. Click on PDXVwer.exe and follow the instructions.

You can choose to associate all pdf-files with PDFXChange viewer instead of Adobe Acrobat Reader (this is what I have done). All your pdf-documents will then be opened in PDFXChange viewer.

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So what does it do? PDFXChange viewer gives you a range of utilities, for example a tool to highlight text, to cross out text, to copy text, to add comments etc. All for free. You must see this (and play around with the tools) to believe it.

With this brilliant tool you can now modify pdf-documents (and save them again as modified versions) – excellent for giving feedback on documents submitted by students as pdf-files.

Rating 5/5 Compiling pdf-documents Sometimes you might want to combine individual pdf-documents into 1 – this could be because you saved your main document in several parts or because you scanned in documents as individual pages. And now you want everything in one document. With the right software it is not a big problem. Go to http://www.softpedia.com/progDownload/PDFTK-Builder-Download-75136.html and get PDFTK Builder 3.6. Click on the “External Mirror 1 (exe)” link. A popup window will open. Save the file and run the setup-programme.

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Once installed, you can combine different pdf-documents into one. Start PDFTK Builder And click on “Add...”. A new popup window will open, which lets you browse for the files you want to combine.

Simply highlight the documents you want to combine (hold the “Ctrl-key” on your keyboard while clicking on the individual files allows you to select several files in one go) and press “Open”.

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Your selected files will populate the Source PDF Document panel. You can sort the files (and change their order), if required, by pressing the “Sort” or “Move Down” button.

Click on “Save As....” and give your new file a name. That‟s it. Your new document now contains all the previous documents in 1 file. You can even protect your file with a password.

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There is also a „Pro‟ version available, but so far I have not felt the need to use this. The freeware version of PDFTK Builder is perfect for painless compilation of pdf-documents.

Rating 5/5

Converting pdf-documents into Word documents Sometimes you might want to convert a pdf-document back into a format that can be read (and modified) by a text editor like Microsoft Word. This is particularly useful, if you have to make some extensive changes or if you want to edit the original pdf-document (for example delete certain parts etc). There is quite a bit of software around that all promises to give very accurate and speedy results, but unfortunately for most of the stuff you have to pay. However, I found two online-services that allow you to convert your pdf-file into a Word-readable format for free. The first one is http://www.pdfonline.com/pdf2word/index.asp

Simply browse for your document you want to convert and press the “Upload and Convert” button. Within less than 30 seconds you will see the status page, confirming that your conversion was successful. From here you can download your converted document. Just left-click on the link (this will open a new popup window) and open or save the file. Be aware that your file-size might increase dramatically with this operation. For example while a pdf-file was 1.1 MB, the corresponding rtf-file grew to 10 MB. It therefore will take a while to download and display your document, so be patient. Also note that your files will be converted into the rtf-format (which is readable by most wordprocessing software). Sounds good? But doesn‟t work for all pdf-files, unfortunately. I found that some converted documents are ok, while others require a lot of additional editing. Another problem is that this conversion does not recognize any special characters, like Greek letters.

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Another free conversion programme is available at http://www.pdftoword.com/.

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Click the “Browse” button to insert the pdf-file you want to convert, choose whether you want the converted document in a doc- or rtf-format and enter your email-address. The file will be uploaded to the conversion site, converted and emailed back to you. This service is more accurate than the previous one, but some documents still might require extensive editing. Also, as before, no special characters will be recognized. The file I submitted for conversion (1.6 MB) was returned as a zip file as an email-attachment. The conversion was fairly swift (it took only a few minutes to receive the email) and surprisingly accurate. Also, the size of the extracted file was only 1.6 MB and hence almost identical to the size of the original pdf-document. The disadvantage of this conversion is that sometimes (at peak-usage of the internet) the conversion can take a rather long time. In one case I received the converted file 14 hours after submission. I am also weary of giving my email-address to someone I don‟t know, but with a good spam-filter this should not be too big a problem. How „secure‟ is online conversion? I don‟t know the answer to this question, but I certainly would not submit any classified documents like exam papers or reserved minutes of meetings. There might be better and more accurate conversion software available, which can be installed on a local PC, so if anyone finds something that does the job quickly and accurately (even recognizing special characters), please let us know.

Rating for both conversion web sites 3/5