Are you the PDF Master you claim to be? Put yourself to the test and take the challenge. AcrrobatUsers.com is holding a contest to see who can make the most creative and original PDF Portfolio with Acrobat 9.

PDF Portfolios, formerly known as PDF Packages, is a feature that combines different documents into a single bundle you can then attach to your PDF. You can combine Word documents, spreadsheets, and emails while still retaining the file settings of each individual file. And now the people over at Adobe want to what you can do with this feature.

The submitted entries will be judged on the overall quality, effectiveness, and appearance. Your entry can include “images, graphics, Flash files, video, various document types and JavaScripting”—basically anything that can be made into a visually compelling PDF portfolio. So be as thematic and creative as you can be.

The prizes will be worth the effort. First prize is a copy of Acrobat 9 Pro Extended for Windows or, for Mac, Acrobat 9 Pro. Second prize is a Special Edition 8 GB iPod Nano. And third prize is an AcrobatUsers.com T-shirt. Your PDF Portfolio will also be up for display in the upcoming PDF Portfolio Gallery on the site.  

To submit an entry, you’ll need to upload your PDF Portfolio along with an entry form online. AcrobatUsers.com has a ton of resources to help get you started. The deadline to enter is October 7, 2008. For more details you can check out the official announcement here.

Good Luck!

Whether you think about it or not, most of the web content you save in a PDF is excess material you don’t ever really need. Did you really need those 7 extra paragraphs? The picture of an ugly toad in the corner? The web page ads?

If you ever wanted more precision with Web to PDF converters, Select,Arrange. is just the thing you’re looking for. With the many Web to PDF applications out there, Select,Arrange. might not sound like anything special.  

But what catches the eye about this converter is that Select,Arrange. lets you select the fragments of web text or online images you want in your PDF. How?

How To Select and Arrange Your PDF Online

This online application works in conjunction with a Firefox browser extension that once downloaded, will give you the ability to select sections, paragraphs or individual images from any website.

You can then save these fragments with titles and tags in an online Select,Arrange. user account until you’re ready to start "arranging” them together in a book project that results in a printable PDF. 

To create your PDF, you need to be logged into your account where you can then drag and drop and put your collected image and text fragments in order using the designated “Drag Your Fragments Here” box. You can then use the Select,Arrange. layout templates to customize the content’s appearance.

You can start surfing the web and creating your custom PDF online by signing up for an online account and downloading the extension.  

The digital trend these days is about doing everything—even the littlest things, online. You want to do everything you do on the desktop on the Internet, charge-free, plug-in-free and software-free.

If you’re one of the many who are looking to expand your PDF work online, you might want to check out A.nnotate.

Because the service is focused on annotating and adding notes, A.nnotate gives you power features to customize how you work with the notes you attach to your PDF. You can add tags to your notes, adjust display options, highlight text, colour categorize, and search your notes by index in either a single PDF or across all documents in your account. 

Moreover, A.nnotate doubles as a collaborative tool. Your documents and the notes created for them can be shared with others. And to keep track of group reviews, PDF notes are signed, dated and, for workflow purposes, are attached with a history of changes made to a tag.

To start annotating your documents, you’ll need to create an account. A.nnotate has a free version available and a monthly subscription service if you need more document space. After that you can start uploading your PDFs for fast, on the fly reviewing.

If you want to add more online tools to your PDF toolbox, check out the site for more details.

If you’re a Wikipedia user who’s tried to save an article in the PDF format, then you know that the results aren’t too great. You simply get a snapshot of a saved HTML page in a PDF viewer, give or take a few a few re-formatting touches here and there.

Well,you can actually get better PDF quality by converting those Wikipedia articles with WikiType, an online application that creates PDFs from Wikipedia articles and WikiBooks.

Now you may be thinking that converting an HTML page into PDF is nothing new. It’s something you can do with any HTML to PDF conversion softwareout there. However, what sticks out about WikiType is that the PDF conversion is especially
made for Wikipedia articles.

This means you get a clean re-formatted PDF without the webpage formatting you get in your browser and, then in your PDF via conversion.  With WikiType, web page elements like side menus, edit links, banners and bulleted links, get neatly reformatted or eliminated to give you a document-like appearance for your PDF.  

If you need a Wikipedia article in proper PDF appearance, simply copy the URL of the wiki page, paste it into the WikiType interface and submit. The generated PDF will be set up with an official title page, a properly formatted table of contents, professional headers and footers, PDF bookmarks and page numbers.

Be warned though that included in your PDF is a 5 page GNU documentation license at the end of the article and a single GNU publication page at the beginning (after the title page). You’ll end up with a few extra pages you didn’t expect. Other than that, WikiType comes in handy for reading those Wiki documents offline in a readable format.

Reading PDFs on your mobile device is one thing. But being able to create them is another. If you’ve got a cell phone or PDA that has a built in digital camera, then you’ve got the essential tools needed for creating a PDF file on the go.

What Is scanR?

With the online service of US based company, scanR, you can create scanned PDFs from photos of whiteboards, business cards and paper documents taken with your cell phone camera or a digital camera.

So instead of manually recording information, copying out complex whiteboard diagrams or relying on scanning devices and desktop software, you can simply take a picture of it.

Before and after shots of a document conversion

(Images from scanr.com)

After you take the picture, all you have to do is send in your digital image to scanR via the scanR Mobile application, email, or MMS (multi media messaging), and you’ll be sent an email containing your scanned PDF file.

If you're interested, the scanR service provides support for scanning letter and A4 sized documents, colour PDF creation, 15 photos per message processing, auto-tagging and more PDF handling options (eg. online sharing) through the scanR mobile website. You can even have your documents faxed to both national and international numbers.

Getting Mobile PDF Creation On Your Phone

In order to start creating your scanned PDFs on the go, you can download the scanR mobile application onto your phone. Or you can start by signing up for an account. A simple trial plan is available in addition to the scanR Pro plan that offers monthly and annual subscription options.

For a listing of supported platforms and devices, you can check out the scanR site and blog for more downloading and application details.

If you want to get more productivity, convenience and functionality out of your mobile device, a mobile PDF creation app is definitely one handy tool to have.

Get ready to celebrate because the PDF industry has reached a major milestone.

If you haven’t heard the news yet, on July 2^nd, 2008, after more than 10 years on the market as a de facto standard, the Portable Document Format (PDF) was approved for ISO certification as an international standard.

PDF standardization, as everyone knows, has been long overdue. In 15 years, 9 generations of technology have come and gone (we’re at Acrobat 9 now!). The fact that the PDF has made it through the long years and has improved steadily from version to version is a testament to its capabilities and uses as a format.

Glancing Back To A Present Moment

Of course, as a standard as it will mean the significant changes PDF critics and experts have been talking about for over a year now. I remember in a February 2007 posting, I threw up a few questions that were aimed at the moment when PDF 1.7 got its certification:

“Yet, aside from the competition with the ISO approval for OOXML, Adobe is also seeing competition with itself. When the PDF 1.7 spec gets its ISO certification, changes will have to be made in software already being used for PDF files. How will pre-ISO PDF files be handled as opposed to post-ISO PDF files? This also means changes for third party vendors-- their products, their market and their projects. There’ll be a ripple to accommodate the adjustments, but just how big?”

I guess we can start fully answering those questions now . . . .

Are you looking forward to working with PDF files? Hope so. Because there’s no time like the present to be a PDF user.

Cheers!

Major news in the PDF world this week is a mixed bag of releases and vulnerabilities.

First off, the Acrobat 9 family has now been officially released. The upgrade version everyone’s been waiting for is available for purchase and includes a number of buzz worthy goodies such as Flash integration and document synchronization. Acrobat 9 also has the ability to compare different versions of a single PDF and an enhanced webpage to PDF conversion feature.

If you want to check out the features in depth, free trials for all three versions are available on the Adobe site.

The other announcement this week—a new Adobe Reader and Acrobat vulnerability has been discovered. The security bulletin on the Adobe site claims that the vulnerabilities found in the current Reader and Acrobat versions 8.0 through 8.1.2 have the ability to crash the applications, which could allow malicious users to take over your system.

This probably has you worried if your PDF apps are prone to stalling and then crashing moments later. Fortunately, patches are available for the affected software versions. For more information on this security threat visit the Adobe Security Bulletin.

Everyone is looking for software alternatives these days. It’s a given fact with postings in the blogosphere like ”10 Alternatives to (enter software here)”. Well, Adobe has been busy this month with new releases and one of them is Acrobat.com, a website that may be the alternative you’re looking for.

Acrobat.com is a bundle of online services of Adobe software tools you use every day- file sharing and storage, PDF converter, online word processor and even web conferencing. So how does Acrobat.com online stack up against Adobe
desktop software?

If you haven’t gotten around to checking it out or committing to it with an account, here are some links on resources, user reviews and commentaries to see what users are saying about this major online alternative and what it’s all about.

*TechCrunch gives you a brief rundown of Acrobat.com.

*See what other blogs on Technorati had to say about the news.

*A few user weaknesses you should know about Acrobat.com that ars technica made note of.

*If you need a bit of orientation on what the major components of Acrobat.com do, PC Advisor looks at each of them in turn: Buzzword, ConnectNow, Adobe Share and access to online PDF creator.

*Check out the Acrobat.com blog written by the Acrobat.com designers themselves. See what they have in mind for the site.

*Don Fluckinger, writing for PDFZone, takes an interesting look at the implications of Acrobat.com as Adobe’s competition against. . .itself?

*And no online service is complete without an Acrobat.com forum to connect with other users. The discussions and questions have already started.

Whether you look at Acrobat.com as a godsend, a competition killer, or a reason to change the way you work, you have to admit you can’t get any better alternative to Adobe desktop software than Adobe software online.

Investintech.com – PDF Solutions, The GOLD STANDARD of PDF Developer Tools, is happy to announce the winner of our exclusive TechEd 2008 Gold Bar Giveaway contest. The grand prize for this contest is a 1 Ounce Troy solid gold bar, which was on display at our exhibit booth during the TechEd 2008 Developer week.

Our random selection algorithm has chosen:Thomas B Soeder of Arrow Electronics

Congratulations Thomas! We will be in contact with you shortly to arrange delivery for the gold bar.

Thank you to all who entered – we appreciate your interest and good will in entering our contest!

The Tech Ed Conference is in full swing, and Investintech is already seeing –and hearing, some interesting things from the conference floor.

In his last public speech as Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect (CSA), Bill Gates took over 6,000 software developers at Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 in Orlando on a walk down memory lane and then outlined his vision for the future of application development.

Describing himself as a developer at heart, Gates provided a brief look back at how far software development has come since he co-founded Microsoft over 30 years ago. He recalled fondly the days of working in DOS and writing software programs that only required 6k of memory.

Those days are of course long past now and with Gates transitioning out of a full time role at Microsoft on July 1, he devoted the majority of his keynote to the future.

The central theme here and for all of Tech Ed for that matter, is that cloud computing is the next big thing.

Microsoft is betting on this in a big way and Gates made it clear that this is driving a lot of what Microsoft is doing on the application development and services front.

Within the application development realm , Gates pointed to Project Oslo, Microsoft’s application-development plan for making it easier for developers to build SOAs (service-oriented architectures). SOAs allow the underlying software running a company’s network to communicate with software and pieces of software outside the firewall using standard network and application interfaces to create composite applications.

On the services side, Gates made mention of the fact that Microsoft is embracing the hosted services business model by investing in building the industry’s largest data centers for services.

Gates noted: “We’re taking everything we do at the server level and saying we will have a service that mirrors that exactly,”

If you didn’t get a chance to get out to Orlando, don’t worry about missing a thing. You can get all the latest scoops right here.

Stay tuned!

The Investintech PDF Developer Tools team is going to be exhibiting live on location at the Microsoft Tech Ed 2008 Developer Conference in Orlando from June 2-6.

Will you be there? If so, come find us on the exhibition floor in Booth D1132 .

Regardless of whether you can be there or not, we have some great things in store for you here at Investintech.com and on our blog for the week of the conference, including:

• Our Pure Gold Giveaway – Enter for your chance to Win a 1-Ounce Gold Bar (more on that below).
• Daily blog wrap-ups from Tech-Ed, including Bill Gates’ keynote session.
• Instant updates from the conference floor and conference sessions via Twitter.

Investintech Pure Gold Giveaway

Check in over the next few days here at our blog, as we will have more details on how you can enter for your chance to win a 99% pure 1-ounce Gold Bar, valued at the daily current market price (roughly US$900 as of this writing).