Crocodoc is replacing its Flash-based viewer with an HTML5 version, which Crocodoc claims is a first. The company claims that the new viewer is significantly faster, and renders documents more accurately than Flash-based solutions. Here’s a sample of a formatted document.

Despite the “viewer” name, embedded documents can be not only viewed, but they can be marked up and forms can be filled in. Marked-up documents can then be downloaded in PDF format. The markup tools don’t allow for full document editing, but they’re probably more than sufficient for many teams’ needs.

Crocodoc’s API is also being updated, which allows users to create embeddable HTML5 document viewers that can be customized in both appearance and behavior. The company is also starting a partnership program that will allow other companies to license its technologies. Since many project management systems include components for marking up documents, Yammer, an enterprise social networking app, will be rolling out Crocodoc’s document tools in the next few days.

Mobile apps are also in development, with an iPad app coming shortly, followed by similar apps for iOS and Android.

Crocodoc is free for individuals, and the API is also free for non-commercial use. Pricing for commercial use of the API is priced based on the number of documents uploaded to Crocodoc each month, whether documents are hosted on their servers or elsewhere, and whether or not the viewer is co-branded.

The folks at Crocodoc tell me that they are out to replace Adobe Acrobat as the preferred way to display, view and mark up highly-formatted documents, and today’s enhancements are just the first step. It will be interesting to see how the service develops.

Have you used Crocodoc? How do you collaborate on document production and editing?

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All of these products are good at what they do, but they are either tied to a specific vendor, or don’t support Adobe’s widely-used system of copy protection for PDF and ePub files. These files are also sometimes called Adobe Content Server 4 (ACS4) documents.

For reading such books, the free Bluefire Reader for iPhone, iPad and iPad touch is now available. It has a simple interface that is attractive and easy to navigate. The app doesn’t have the wealth of options that Stanza does, but it does allow you to select font size, page turn animations, contrast, and black-on-white or white-on-black text (other color schemes, called themes, are coming). The app can operate in portrait or landscape mode, and it allows you to bookmark and copy text.

In order to read books using the Adobe copy-protection system, you can register the app using your Adobe ID and password, a process that went very quickly and smoothly for me.

As the current version is a 1.0 release, Bluefire Reader is still missing some features. Notably, its system for actually acquiring books is pretty limited. The “Get Books” option offers access to the Feedbooks library of free original and public-domain books, but there isn’t yet a way to copy books from one’s desktop computer, or to access free or paid e-book libraries like Fictionwise or Mobipocket.

The developers told me that they are working on setting up access to other sources, including some of the systems used by public libraries. Here in Seattle, for example, our library system uses Overdrive Digital Library Reserve; other systems are used in other places. I gathered that the developers were rather surprised at how quickly their app was approved, and now seem to be working overtime to add the missing features.

It would certainly be nice if DRMed books fell out of fashion, just as copy-protected software (mostly) did. But until then, Bluefire Reader looks like it will be a good way to read them.

What e-reader do you use?

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PDF Viewers

The free Adobe Reader has been the de facto standard for viewing PDF files ever since it was introduced in 1993, but it has become bloated and vulnerable to malware attacks over the years. There are some free alternatives for viewing PDF files that are more streamlined and faster.

• Foxit PDF Reader is a lightweight PDF viewer for that is popular. (Windows)
• CoolPDF Reader is freeware that claims to be the smallest PDF reader available, at only 650kb. It can also convert PDF files to many different formats such as TXT, GIF, JPG and more. (Windows)
• PDF-XChange Viewer reads and edits PDF files for free. (Windows)
• Skim is an open-source PDF reader. (Mac)

Tools for Creating, Editing & Converting PDF Files

The good news is that just about every popular office application — including Microsoft Office 2007/2010, OpenOffice, Google Docs — now include built-in ways to save documents as PDF files. This means that many people no longer needs that expensive Adobe Acrobat license if all they need to do is create basic PDF files from documents. That said, there are also some useful standalone free tools for creating and editing PDF files:

• CutePDF Writer is my favorite free tool for creating PDF files outside of using the built-in PDF features of tools like Office and Google Docs. It installs a PDF printer that you send documents to in order to create them as PDF files. (Windows)
• PDF Creator creates PDF files for free, as well as converting them to other usable formats. (Windows)
• PrimoPDF is another free PDF writer for personal and commercial use. (Windows)
• HelloPDF converts PDF files to Microsoft Word document format, for free. (Windows)
• PDFill PDF Editor is the most robust free solution in this bunch, so don’t let its rather unimpressive website give you the wrong impression. It is chock full of features normally only found in premium PDF editors, such as the ability to merge files, convert files to multiple image formats, e-book options and more. (Windows)
• Skim, the open-source PDF reader I listed above, also includes some editing tools. (Mac)

e-Book Creation Tools

If you want to distribute your PDFs as e-books, you can use one of the free eBook publishing platforms.

• Stanza has a powerful e-book publishing solution for Windows and Mac.
• Calibre provides a publishing platform for Windows, Mac and even Linux.

Online PDF Tools

There are some free online tools that do the same things as the desktop tools listed above. Some let you edit PDF files, some convert them and others merge them. Here are some of the most popular solutions.

• PDFescape lets you create PDF files online; you don’t even need to register without even registering. However, if you do register (for free) then you can do other things such as save the PDF files online in your own secure account. There’s also a free PDF reader. You can create PDF files with up to 50 pages and up to 2 MB in size for free. Commercial use is acceptable, and there is no watermarked logo on any of the PDF pages. You can also password protect your PDF files.
• PDF to Word Convert PDF files to Word format with Nitro PDF’s online tool. The only catch is that it might take a little while to get the converted file.
• Nitro PDFHammer allows you to edit PDF files online and convert them to other formats.
• PDF2Word Online is another tool for converting PDF files to Word documents.
• Free OCR is a useful online service for extracting the text from PDF and image files. The one caveat is that it will only scan one-page PDF files or the first page of a multi-page PDF for free (although, of course, you could convert multiple page PDF files to images first, before uploading them to Free OCR).

Let us know your favorite free PDF tools in the comments.

Photo credit: cohdra

Right away I was attracted to PDFVue because of its Firefox integration. Currently, the feature is still in testing, so you’ll have to have a free Mozilla.org account to use it. You can then download the Firefox PDFVue plugin, which opens PDF links in a new tab in PDFVue, instead of trying to launch Acrobat or Preview, both of which cause headaches and hang-ups on my MacBook from time to time.

PDFVue offers editing and annotation of files directly in your browser. You have text selection and annotation tools, and a variety of viewing options. You can automatically zoom the document to fit the page, although PDFVue is missing a fullscreen reading view, which would be greatly appreciated.

It may not have all the nice-to-haves of a fully-featured app like Acrobat, but it does all the necessary bits, like commenting. You can tweak your comments as desired, including changing the font and text color and size, comment box color and border, and whether or not the comment will show up on a printed copy of the document. You can also add links wherever you want, and attach sticky notes. Any markup you add shows up in the summary in the right-hand menu so that you, or anyone else, can quickly jump to it.

You can also create and edit forms using PDFVue. Clicking the “Forms” tab will give you access to checkboxes, text fields, radio buttons, drop-down menus, and submit buttons. It’s not as full-featured as Adobe Acrobat Pro’s own form creation tool, but it’s enough to get the job done if you just want to throw together something simple quickly.

Of course, you can save and download any PDF file made or edited in PDFVue, and share it with others via an automatically generated unique URL. All in all, it’s a handy little tool, and a nice, lightweight alternative to desktop-based options. Check it out if, like most web workers, you find yourself running into a lot of PDFs in the course of your daily web work.

What do you use for working with PDFs?

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A buffer overflow exploit has been discovered that could render your computer vulnerable to attack; a malicious party could potentially use the exploit to take control of your machine. All versions of Acrobat and Reader from 7 onwards on all platforms are vulnerable to attack.  Patches to these products will not be available until March 11th. Until Adobe issue an update, it may be advisable to switch to an alternative PDF reader (Foxit works well for Windows), and, as always, it would be a good idea to make sure that your antivirus software is up-to-date and exercise extreme caution when opening files from untrusted sources.

(via DownloadSquad)

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These tips from PC magazine serve as a good reminder of how to be more judicious with our printing. The suggestions include using your Print Preview more thoroughly, printing to PDF for digital storage and searchability, and really considering whether or not a print job is truly necessary.

Do you have any additional tips? Do you consider yours a paperless office?

(photo credit: Flickr user josef.stuefer)

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Printing your GCal

Chances are if you are a user of Google Calendar, at some point in time you’ve wanted to share your calendar with someone. Whether it be your husband/wife who wants to know what your week looks like, or a business colleague who you want to schedule a meeting with, easily sharing calendars can be a bit tricky. Sure you can always share your calendar with them via their Google Calendar or iCal, but what about the times you just want to easily give a snapshot of your day/week’s schedule?

Tech-Recipies.com shows us how to do this. First, click on the Print link at the top of your Google Calendar. Then, in the printing preferences, use the dropdowns to adjust the Font Size and Orientation. Check the Black and White checkbox. Now that you are done, click the “Save As…” button to easily download your newly created PDF calendar.

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Even though PDF is a fantastic format for sharing documents, (as discussed in the last Monday Time Saver post) viewing them in a browser can be annoying.  Typically, you either have to download and open them in Adobe Acrobat or view them in the browser (which can cause your browser to crash).  When it comes right down to it, opening a PDF can be cumbersome task.

With the web application called PDFMeNot, you by bypass the need to open a separate reader application by opening the PDF directly inside your browser.  This handy application called “A nicer way of linking to your PDFs” and instantly makes the PDF viewable in side a viewable in-browser display.

Tracking your online time with 8aweek

The web can be a very distracting place.  Getting caught up in ‘web surfing’ can drastically hinder our ability to get work done.  8aweek is a Firefox plug-in that helps you account for your time on the web.  You can easily use 8aweek to add some hard numbers to how long you spend on specific web sites that may not be additive to your professional career.

8aweek lumps sites together, so if you spend time on CNet’s News.com (looking at work news items) and CNet.com (looking for a new digital toy), all your time will be reported as visiting CNet.com.  Additionally, time spend in Google Reader will be lumped in with time searching at Google.com.  With 8aweek, you can restrict the time you spend on different sites, depending on your personal preferences.

Move your email around between Gmail accounts

Lifehacker recently posted tips regarding moving your email between Gmail accounts.  Why would you want to do this?  Have you ever opened a second Gmail account, perhaps one for business and one for personal?  How would you easily move a large quantity of messages been the two accounts?  Using Lifehacker’s techniques, this becomes easy.

The method for doing this begins by enabling POP access on your first Gmail account (the mailbox your copying items out of).  Then, log out of the first Gmail account and log in to your second Gmail account (the one your copying items into).  Within the second account, click on Settings, then Accounts.  In the Get mail from other accounts section, click “Add another mail account”.  Enter in your settings, following the screenshot below as an example.

Your old messages will be imported in automatically by Gmail.  You may want to go back and turn on forwarding to your new account and disabling POP access, whichever is best for your situation.

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