pdf

A few MacFixIt readers have recently contacted me regarding an issue with not being able to view some PDFs that were made on their OS X systems after upgrading to OS X 10.6.7. This includes viewing the PDF on their Macs, as well as seeing them on other platforms such as Windows, iOS, and Linux.

Usually PDF rendering problems can happen if the system is experiencing font corruption; most of the time this can be tackled with a general maintenance routine to clear caches, coupled with checking and managing fonts with Font Book. In these cases the problems … Read more

Recently we published an article discussing options on how to convert Web articles into nicely formatted PDF documents. While having PDFs is a convenient way to maintain well-formatted and clean articles on various subjects, after a while you may end up with a number of them, that can lead to a cluttered mess of PDFs.

There are options in OS X for managing PDFs and other documents, including smart folders and other ways of searching for them to consolidate into one location, or you can use spotlight's indexing to locate them by contents. In addition, as suggested by MacFixIt … Read more

Many times people may wish to save an article they've come across on the Web, in order to reference it later, when they may be offline. There are several ways you can do this, including taking screenshots, saving the page as a Web archive or HTML source, or printing to PDF. Each of these options has its benefits and drawbacks, but only one will allow you to create clean and nicely formatted PDFs of the article you are viewing.

Saving Web pages The first option is to save the Web page of an article you are reading. You can … Read more

Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded:

Apple sends out invites, apparently for the launch of the second-generation iPad

A new lineup of MacBook Pros is announced

Microsoft says the software update for Windows Phone 7 does not brick phones 90 percent of the time

The Open Library announces its free e-book lending program

Netflix announces a two-year deal to stream shows from our parent company, CBS

Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg is immortalized in a new comic book

Enter OverDrive Media Console is an app that cuts out the middleman (i.e., your PC) when it comes to getting free epubs on your mobile device. With OverDrive, you can download library e-books (and audiobooks) directly to your iOS device.

That's the good news. The bad news is that getting the app set up is a major pain, and as e-book readers go, it's mediocre at best. Plus, the selection isn't what we'd call extensive, at least from our test library.

To download books, you must first "Add a Website" (meaning choose your … Read more

Back in November I told you about Bluefire Reader, an iOS app with support for the ePub e-book format used by many public libraries.

In other words, you can use it to check out books free of charge--but you had to do a lot of desktop hoop-jumping to make it happen.

Enter OverDrive Media Console, an app that cuts out the middleman (i.e., your PC). With OverDrive, you can download library e-books (and audiobooks!) directly to your iOS device. I just grabbed "Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil," and I have "The Help" … Read more

For people who love to read but don't have a lot of extra cash to spend on books, nothing beats the public library. (Thanks Ben Franklin!) Even better, in recent years, many libraries have started offering e-books that you can check out for a few weeks, just like the real thing. Unfortunately, despite the plethora of e-book readers in the App Store, you couldn't read these DRM-protected library titles on your iPhone, iPod, or iPad.

Until now, that is. Bluefire Reader supports not only ePub and PDF formats, but also the Adobe DRM used by most libraries. During … Read more

What's SEP? If you Google the SEP file extension, you might think it's an enhancer for The Sims, the popular game. Or maybe it's a TIFF, or maybe a printer separation page. For our purposes, SEP stands for Sursen e-Paper. It's a proprietary digital document technology that competes with Adobe's PDF format, especially in China, where it holds a substantial market share, according to the developer. So, sooner or later, a lot of people will probably need to open and read SEP files. That's where Sursen's SEP Reader comes in. It's a … Read more

Google helped make Adobe Systems' PDF files a first-class citizen on the Web years ago by indexing their content with its search engine. Now it's gone another step by building the ability to read them into its latest browser, Chrome 8, released yesterday for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

That means when people click a PDF link, the document will open directly in the browser. Chrome's built-in PDF reader is also walled up within a sandbox, lowering the risk that security issues will escape a confined region of memory to facilitate a broader attack on a computer.

The PDF … Read more