With the repeated announcement of (minor) incidents with the security of the original PDF reader from Adobe, I wondered what could be a good replacement. Obviously, it seems important to stay around free or low prices (Adobe Acrobat: Windows/Mac/Linux, Basic: free, Pro: $299), but is it possible to beat the Adobe product to read PDF files?

• PDF-XChange (Windows, Basic: free, Pro: $34): loads real fast (much faster than the Adobe viewer), has all the basic options (annotations, graphic annotations, etc.) and the Pro version allows to reorganize the pages of a document or to extract text from it.
• Foxit (Windows/Linux, Basic: free, Pro Pack: $39.99): loads even faster, allows annotations (but only the Pro versio does it without watermark).
• Sumatra PDF (Windows, free): is even simple; everything is done for sheer speed.
• Apple PDF Preview (Mac, free): is very powerful (and it’s free, remember) and included in the MacOS offering; annotations, extraction, reorganization, all is available

You wanted to get the contents of this PDF file in a usable form. say! a Word document.

Here comes PDF-to-Word, touted as “The Most Accurate PDF-to-Word Converter”, which may be quite right.

It’s online, it’s free, it’s only 3 steps away:

PDF-to-Word (free online converter)

The converted document will arrive directly in your email box.

Keen eyes like yours will have noticed the opportunity to produce not only Word documents but also RTF documents which can be read as easily in Word as in any other word processor on any kind of machine.

The PDF file format is a little gem invented by Adobe that brought the enormous advantage of a portable file format able to display a document on nearly any kind of display and computer. Unfortunately, the Adobe PDF format and free player are not exempt from problems and this generated a wealth of applications worth knowing to support all your needs around the PDF format.

Here are the best ones solving what were problems (until now):

• PDF documents cannot be modified. Wrong! With the help of PDF Hammer (an online free tool suite), you can perform basic edits like: add, remove, re-arrange one of more pages from one or more PDF files.



• PDF forms cannot be modified. Wrong! Actually, if you use PDFescape (online), you’ll be able to fill PDF forms and make minor modifications to the document.
• PDF documents cannot be restored back to plain text. Wrong! Thanks to free PDF Text online, you can just copy-and-paste text from the PDF file you want. It can even preserve the bookmarks and font of the original file.
• PDF documents are always long to load. Wrong! Actually, it is a problem of the Adobe PDF reader. Despite being free, it became so bloated that it takes days (Ok, I’m prone to exageration) to open and load the first file. The solution is simply to use a free alternative PDF reader like PDF-XChange viewer.
• Opening PDF files on the web is slow. Right, but…, if you are the webmaster, you can use PdfMeNot to transform your PDF files into Flash media that will be easier to handle on your web site.

A guide published by Canon to help you better manage colour with photo cameras and photo printers from this brand.

Canon color management guide (2MB PDF file)