Posts Tagged ‘pdf’

Now that I’ve got access to a Kindle, articles like this one are catching my eye: Starting next month, O’Reilly (publishers of technology-oriented books) will make select titles available in digital e-book bundles. While you may not care about picking up the latest edition of Perl in a Nutshell or Unix Power Tools in digital format, this is still worth mentioning because, rather than picking one format and then requiring customers to tether themselves to a device that supports that format, O’Reilly is providing readers a choice to go with PDF, a Kindle-compatible format, a Sony-compatible format, or all of the above. Or you can buy the good ol’ fashioned print edition, same as always.

O’Reilly’s doing a couple of other nice things, too: One, if you buy a PDF book now (the only format they currently support) they’ll give you the bundle when it’s available next month. Two, they’re trusting their customers and not placing digital rights management, or DRM, on the downloaded books. DRM is common with purchased music and video files and is designed to keep people from illegally sharing them, but more often than not causes undue headaches to honest customers.

Anyway, if there’s something for us all to take away from this it’s to think about ways to give consumers–whether they be programmers, teachers, or students–options as to how they may access and use your content.

I’m usually pretty good about keeping my computers’, cameras’, and miscellaneous gadgets’ manuals on file. Inevitably, though, I come across a problem and find my manual filing system has failed me. If this happens to you as well, don’t worry–a copy is often just a few clicks away.

As more companies provide user documentation on CD-ROM, they are also placing that same documentation online. Manufacturers like Apple, HP, Canon, and Polycom make it easy to find manuals for their products, usually alongside driver updates and other important information related to your gadget.

No luck on the manufacturer’s site? Don’t give up yet–SafeManuals.com may have what you need. The site archives more than 800,000 manuals, free for download. It’s not limited to just computer-related items, either–I found the owner’s guide to my nine-year-old car on the site.

Where do you go first for tech support? Share your tips with other Hello readers in the comments below.

Reference:
Gunderloy, M. (2008, June 6). Find your missing manuals. Web Worker Daily. Retrieved June 6, 2008, from http://webworkerdaily.com/2008/06/06/find-your-missing-manuals/.

Here’s another interesting example of publishing on demand: Offbeat Guides is a brand new service promising to deliver travel guides customized to your travel plans. The site asks five questions about your trip, then quickly generates a PDF with general destination information, specific weather and event information for the dates you’re visiting that destination, and other tips based on how you’ve answered the questionnaire. The PDF is available nearly immediately for $9; a printed version can also be had for about $25 plus shipping. Michael Arrington at TechCrunch has a full rundown of Offbeat Guides, including a video interview with founder Dave Sifry and an example guide for Paris.

Aside from the extreme personalization of the guide, a few things strike me as particularly interesting about this venture. First, the basic model of on-demand publishing, coupled with the methods in which Offbeat Guides acquire and use data, makes for publications that wouldn’t be feasible through traditional publishing. As Mr. Sifry notes, Offbeat Guides is probably offering the first robust travel guide for Carlsbad, California ever (with 30,000 locations available, I wonder if Lawrence made the cut?). Topics seen as unprofitable by traditional publishing houses can make money in this model.

Second, Offbeat Guides is taking advantage of freely available information to create the illustrated event guides, maps, weather forecasts, and other features of each guidebook. In return, they’re developing their own databases of travel-related information and making them freely available to others. Offbeat Guides is quite open in noting that the information in these books is available for free online–they are selling convenience, not information.

Finally, of course, I ask how this concept applies to how the CRL shares information. Could customized SIM manuals, for example, be in our future? Might a teacher or administrator complete a questionnaire and receive a PDF of Learning Strategies and Content Enhancement routines particular to the needs of a classroom or school? Could readers for Fusion or other reading programs be developed based on what a kid says he’s interested in? How else might this concept be used in what we do?

Offbeat Guides aren’t yet available to the public. I’ve registered for an invitation, though (you can, too), and hope to get access before my trip to Chicago in a few weeks. If it works out, I’ll share my experience with the service here.

One of the easiest ways to transfer documents from person to person or from your desktop to a printer is through the use of PDF files. From Adobe, the creator of the PDF format:

“Invented by Adobe Systems and perfected over 15 years, Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) lets you capture and view robust information—from any application, on any computer system—and share it with anyone around the world. Individuals, businesses, and government agencies everywhere trust and rely on Adobe® PDF to communicate their ideas and vision.”

There are many benefits to using this type of file. PDFs are multi-platform which means that they’re viewable on Mac, PC, UNIX, mobile and many other formats. This is really handy if you use a Mac and need to send a file to a PC user! Another key benefit is that they maintain the document’s integrity. All of the fonts, images, and graphics will remain exactly how you created them, regardless of what application you used to make the file. This has been a huge benefit to the printing community because you can submit a file without worrying about font problems or embedded images. PDF files are also searchable and can even be made secure, requiring a password to view them. One thing to be aware of is that the contents (text, etc.) of a PDF cannot be edited once it is made, so you cannot send a rough draft as a PDF file and have others edit it and send it back.

Another great benefit of PDF files is that they can be compressed easily to make a large file more manageable. For example, say that you have a Powerpoint presentation that has a number of photos that you’ve taken. Files like this can often be 10+MB large and this is often large enough to shut down some email boxes! By saving to a PDF file, you can shrink the file down to 1-2MB which is a much more reasonable size.

How to make a PDF file:

This process is slightly different between Mac and PC computers. I am definitely more familiar with the Mac platform, so I encourage the PC users out there to post suggestions in the comments below!

On a Mac, PDF creation is built into the operating system. If you are in Microsoft Word or Powerpoint, go to the File menu and select “print”. In the print dialogue box, there is a button that says PDF. Click on it, select “save to PDF” and you’ll be asked to give the file a name. Type in whatever you want to call it and press “save” and you’re all done! Apple has also included a great PDF application call Preview in with the operating system that allows you to read these files.

On a PC, there isn’t a native way to create a PDF file straight out of Word or Powerpoint. The best way to allow easy PDF creation on a PC is to purchase Adobe Acrobat Professional. It can be a bit pricey, but it will give you all of the features that you could ever want.

There is also a program that has come highly recommended to me called CutePDF Writer. This will allow you to set up a PDF printer on your machine and print PDF files out of most print applications. If you have any experience with this, be sure and share your thoughts in the comments below!

So, that’s a brief overview of PDF files. Here at the Center for Research on Learning, we post almost all of our document online as PDF files to make them available for people to download. Even if you’re not planning on ever creating a PDF file, it is easy to read them from any machine. Adobe has provided a FREE PDF reader called Adobe Acrobat Reader and it is available for download at their website www.adobe.com.

As a little experiment I figured I’d create a slideshow version of How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love PDF Books and share it with you via SlideShare, which is kind of like YouTube for PowerPoint (or Keynote). SlideShare is a great way to share your slides with an audience–you can let them view slides, print them, or pass them along to colleagues. All you need to do is create a free account (it takes about two minutes) and upload your slides–SlideShare does the magic conversion part for you.

So, without further ado, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love PDF Books:”

| View | Upload your own

P.S.: Want audio commentary? Come see me at one of our to-be-determined informal sessions at this summer’s SIM conference and I’ll give it to you live!

I buy a lot of books published by the Pragmatic Programmers. They specialize in technical manuals for software development, including the Ruby on Rails framework we use for things we develop in-house like Dossier and Depot. Like most computer books, these tend to weigh in at 300 pages or so. Try lugging around a couple of those along with a laptop.

Most publishers who cater to developers like me now offer their books in PDF format. Among the benefits are

• PDF versions tend to be a few bucks cheaper
• PDF versions can be purchased and put to use in a matter of minutes
• PDF versions weigh zero pounds, zero ounces
• PDF versions are keyword searchable!
• PDF versions are easily updatable

That last point is important, especially for books with code samples that must be typo-free to work properly. Typos happen, and they get missed when a book goes out the door. A publisher can quickly get an updated version out the door–great for customer relations. The Pragmatic Programmers take this a step further: They provide beta access to works-in-progress. Readers get early access to critical information (Ruby on Rails is a rapidly evolving platform) in return for providing feedback to authors. It’s a neat way to involve readers in the publishing process.

I’ve currently got a beta book on my virtual Pragmatic Programmers bookshelf, so I can show you how the process works.

To begin, an e-mail message arrives to let me know an updated version of my book is available (I can also get this information via RSS).

Looking at my virtual bookshelf, I see that one of my books (Advanced Rails Recipes) has an update available. All I need to do is regenerate the PDF, and the Pragmatic Programmers’ server gets to work.

In a few minutes, I receive another e-mail. This one contains a unique link to my copy of the updated PDF version of the book.

Here’s my updated PDF. At the bottom of each page of the PDF is my registration information–if this copy of the book winds up on a file sharing network, everybody’s going to know who leaked it. (Yes, this method of piracy protection relies heavily on he honors system, but really, so does the print version. It’s not hard to hire a student to scan every page of a book, if you really wanted to.)

Also at the bottom of each page is a link to “report erratum.” This takes me to the errata page for the book:

If I find a problem in the beta book, I can quickly submit it for consideration, or look up corrections submitted by others. Advanced Rails Recipes is pretty far along at this point–earlier additions had lots of reader-submitted fixes.

Is this practical for any book? Probably not–I have a weighty psychology textbook this semester, for example, that may be a bit too dense for reading on the screen. But if it were my only option I could make the PDF version work. And for all of the Pragmatic Programmers books, I can order the paper version just as easily (I can even order the paper and PDF versions as a combo for a few dollars more). I get access to cutting edge material, and I can even give feedback on the book itself if I want. Best of all, I have an entire reference library on my laptop–no trips to the chiropractor required.

What would you think of a PDF version of the SIM library?