PDF Hacks - 100 Industrial strength Tips and Tools by Sid Steward - Book Review

If you have ever downloaded for free ebooks, manuals, consumer guides, etc. from the web you are aware of PDF files. These files are a lot of their popularity to the fact that they can be read on any computer with the free Adobe Reader. Also, most word processing programs have the ability to convert a document into PDF format with the click of a mouse. PDF stands for Portable Document Format, a format created by Adobe Systems for document exchange. I was a passive use until Ipicked up a copy of "PDF Hacks" by Sid Steward. This book really opened my eyes to the many features of this tool.

The first was pdftk interest to me, or PDF Tool Kit is a set of command line tools available for both Windows and Linux. Pdftk with the user can select specific pages of a document, rearrange them, combine with other books, and in essence to create custom reference documents. For example, I have the usual collection of ebooks about writing the article. Combining myfavorite pages from each, I had at hand a reference source. I added my own notes to the various sections to tie together the material and document the drills and procedures that I had discovered.

For some time I used the free open source program Inkscape for creating vector graphics. Inkscape has many of the same features of Adobe Illustrator. Sid shows you how to use pstoedit to create vector files and place them in a document.

There is a section on how to add Web-style navigationthe PDF document. The buttons can be used to connect to online material. It 'easy style of these keys to escape from the usual institutional looking gray buttons.

Hack # 66 shows how to copy protect the PDF document you created. This is very important because of the ease with which documents are passed around on the internet. It 's very frustrating to spend a lot of time and research the development of a commercial product that has real value to the reader only to find that was distributedby others as a free document.

I knew that Visual Basic could be used to access and manipulate PDF. What I do not know, but learned to Hack # 95 was that I could do the same thing with perl. Perl is free, well documented, and has a large community of support. There are a lot of perl modules available to simplify the code for each project.

PDF Hacks is a great book. Get a copy and start creating your own books.

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