It’s that time again. Every year, from around late November to the end of December, I usually start getting that “rushed” feeling where everything gets busier.
You’re trying to fit in some extra Christmas shopping on your lunch break, trying to research the perfect itinerary for your upcoming holiday, or scheduling family events around the city.
So I usually find that a speedlinking post is the best way to get readers—and myself, updated on the PDF world in one quick go. I’ve come across a few noteworthy PDF-related links which I think can summarize the past few weeks quite well.
* First off, Acrobat.com has gone through some changes. If you’re a user of the service, Shredding The Document blogger, David Stromfeld, shows you how to get the most out of the service with a few tips.
* Next, Planet PDF got a chance to interview Thad McIlroy, founder and editor of “The Future of Publishing” blog, to get his opinion on Adobe’s Omniture acquisition after releasing a detailed report called, "Adobe's Designs on Web Analytics: The Omniture Acquisition".
* Kurt Foss covers a case of an improperly redacted PDF file (a TSA airport-security-screening manual) that was posted on the Internet by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA). The incident itself may seem uninteresting (who hasn’t poorly redacted a PDF before?), but the implications of such an error raise a reminder to exercise caution with your own PDFs.
* A PDF security bug was uncovered by SecureThoughts.com blogger, Inferno. Apparently using IE8 to print locally saved web pages to PDF using the IE print function allows “your local disk path [to get] invisibly embedded inside your PDF in the title attribute. Only when you open the file in an Editor like Notepad, you will see it. Currently, there is no option in IE to disable it.” Here’s the rest of the original posting with a simple solution.
* Also, Adobe announces a milestone for their contribution to the digital eBook publishing sector.
* Some exciting news for eBook and PDF users: Kindle just got native PDF support. Amazon’s famous eBook reader now has a built-in PDF Reader so you can display PDF documents on the popular device without converting them first. Kindle customers can either email their PDFs to their Kindle email address or by using a USB connection.
* And although this interview article is more than a month old, I wanted to include it as a hat tip to Adobe’s open source strategy, which hasn’t been covered on this blog yet. In an article, “Why Adobe likes open source” by Simon Bisson and Mary Branscombe of The H, Dave McAllister, hired by Adobe as Director of open source and standards, talks about the reasons behind Adobe’s move to open source certain core technologies.
Happy reading!
