Differences between Save and Save As

Differences between Save and Save As

September 8, 2008 – 6:23 pm

The majority of our users probably aren’t aware there are some big differences between performing a Save and Save As in PDF editing applications such as Nitro PDF Professional and Adobe Acrobat. Over the years I’ve found myself referring to Save as being a ‘quick save’ and a Save As as a ‘full save’.

To talk about the difference between Save and Save As, we need to go into what are known as incremental updates. This is how the PDF References describes incremental updates:

The contents of a PDF file can be updated incrementally without rewriting the entire file. Changes are appended to the end of the file, leaving its original contents intact. The main advantage to updating a file in this way (as discussed in Section 2.2.7, “Incremental Update”) is that small changes to a large document can be saved quickly.

Save

If you haven’t worked it out already, it’s the Save operation in Nitro Pro that performs this incremental update. This is why Save always takes less time than Save As. Go on, give it a try now. Perform identical operations on the same PDF in Nitro Pro and do a Save, then compare it to the Save As.

A common thing we hear from customers is ‘after deleting content from my PDF then saving, the file size becomes larger rather than smaller!’. The reason for this is… incremental updates! If you delete something from a PDF (e.g. a page, or some text off a page) and perform an incremental update, the object you’ve deleted remains in the file, but is marked as being not used. So when a PDF viewer opens the file it knows not to display objects marked as not being used. And, because an incremental update appends information to the end of the file about what has changed, the file size increases.

Another example is if you were using the ‘Replace Image’ feature in Nitro Pro. Say you just wanted to replace a photo of yourself with a better looking version. Both are about the same file size. After replacing the image and saving the file you notice that the file size has increased more than you were expecting (because the image is approximately the same size as the original). Whilst to the eye the old image is gone, the data is still in the PDF file, but is marked as being not used (again, so the PDF viewer doesn’t display it).

• Save = faster save time, slightly larger file sizes usually.

Save As

When a Save As operation is performed, the entire PDF file is rewritten. So if you’ve deleted an image from a page, that object will not be present in the file after the Save As has completed. So in that recent example I gave, the original image that was replaced will not be included in the PDF file when it’s rewritten by Nitro Pro.

• Save As = more compact file sizes, takes a bit longer to complete.

Conclusion

Hopefully this has provided some insight into why the results can be different when saving files in Nitro Pro. Personally, when working on a PDF file I’ll use the Save operation until it comes time to complete the job and send the file off, at which point I’ll run a Save As to rewrite the PDF and ensure the file size is as compact as possible.

Note: There are some situations where incremental saves must be used by the PDF application, but i’ll go into that in a separate blog post.

By Chris Dahl | Posted in knowledge | Comments (0)

Customize Nitro Pro to the Way You Work

August 13, 2008 – 12:16 am

The Nitro PDF Professional interface is set up in a particular way by default but it’s easy to customize based on how you like to work. It’s simply a matter of familiarizing yourself with the settings and configuring Nitro Pro to your liking.

You can edit the interface preferences by heading to the Interface panel in your Preferences. Just click on the Nitro PDF button in the top left, and then click the Nitro Preferences button. The dialog below will open for you to modify.

Read on to learn about each preference.

Extended tooltips

The extended tooltips follow the same principle as the new tooltips in Microsoft Office 2007 application: explain the purpose of each tool (and if there’s room how to use it) so the user won’t need to dig through the user manual. If you’re on a very slow computer, it’s possible these may slow your performance a little, or as a power user you may find them unnecessary. Either way you can turn them off via the preferences.

Explanatory text on dialogs

Many dialogs in Nitro Pro include additional explanatory information at the top of them. Again, like the extended tooltips above, the goal is to help you understand the purpose of the dialog and how to use it, and (hopefully) reduce the need to search through the user guide to understand what’s going on. After using Nitro Pro for a while, you may find this additional information unnecessary — if so, just turn it off in the preferences.

Application color schemes

Nitro PDF Professional includes three different color schemes (a.k.a skins) to choose from. Black, blue and silver. Black is designed to fit the Microsoft Vista look and feel, blue is designed to fit Microsoft XP, and the silver is an added extra that gives you a little more of a Mac feel.

If you use Office 2007, you have similar color scheme options. I like to make the color scheme in Nitro different to Office 2007 so they’re easier to tell apart.

Information bar display

The Information bar is there to notify you of important information about the PDF files you open in Nitro Pro. This includes notifying you when PDF files have been secured, digitally signed, or contain form fields. For some users, particularly those who regularly deal with these kinds of files, receiving constant notifications can get annoying. In the Interface preferences you can turn off either or both of these kinds of notifications.

Bookmark text size

Your eyesight or monitor configuration may mean that you need to adjust the text size used in the Bookmarks pane. With the preferences you can switch between small, medium and large.

Happy Nitro Pro tweaking!

Adjusting Text, Images, Objects and Form Fields in PDF Files

Adjusting Text, Images, Objects and Form Fields in PDF Files

September 9, 2008 – 8:05 pm

In addition to the tools for creating, inserting and editing text, images, links, form fields and other objects in PDF files, the latest Nitro Pro (5.4) includes a set of unique alignment, sizing and positioning tools.

If you’ve been designing PDF forms for a while in Nitro Pro or Acrobat, you’re probably already familiar with how they work. But what’s unique about the capabilities in Nitro Pro is that they’ve been extended to work with other objects, including text, images and links. This becomes particularly useful when source files have gone missing and your only option is to make updates to the PDF file directly.

By combining any of the alignment, sizing, centering, distributing and spacing options into an editing process, you can make faster and more accurate updates directly to your PDF content. Below we’ll look at a few examples of how you could use this functionality to fix your PDF files.

The Alignment context tab appears in the ribbon whenever you have objects selected.

Aligning form field objects

Click the screenshot to see how you can select and then align a group of form fields.

The alignment tools helps with the final polishing stage when form designing — you can quickly throw the fields onto your PDF pages and at the very end adjust them to make everything neat.

1. On the Forms ribbon tab, click Edit All Fields.
2. Select all the fields to align. (Hold down Ctrl and click each field one at a time, or click and drag the cursor to select many at once.)
3. Click the Alignment tab.
4. In the Align group, click the method of alignment.

Adjusting column and row spacing in tables in PDF files

Click the screenshot to see how the spacing between each row is increased and decreased using the spacing options.

The Spacing controls on the far right of the Alignment tab can be used to expand or contract the spacing between any kinds of objects. The most obvious and common use occurs when designing forms, but the spacing tools also present new correction capabilities when working with text-based tables.

Perhaps, you’ve discovered that the alignment in a column or row is wrong or that the table is not filling the space on the page you would like it to. Perhaps you even need to remove or insert another row or column completely. With all of these, you could use the Distribute and Spacing options in Nitro Pro instead of reverting to the convert PDF to Word functionality. Here’s how you could make adjustments:

1. Delete the offending column/row, or insert a new one. (If necessary, you could copy and paste an existing column/row and then update the text content.)
2. With the Edit tool, select all the text objects you’d like to adjust.
3. Click the Alignment tab.
4. In the Distribute group, choose the option to evenly distribute all objects either vertically or horizontally.
5. In the Spacing group, click the appropriate option one or more times to increase or decrease the spacing.

Accurately resizing images and other objects in PDF files

Click the screenshot to see how objects can be resized to match other objects.

You may find that objects such as pictures, links and form fields are not the same size and make your content appear messy. By using the Size options, you can quickly update the height and/or width of objects so they are all the same. The width and/or height change is based on the last object you select before choosing your Size option.

1. Select either the Edit, Edit Links, or Edit All Fields tool.
2. Select all the objects to resize. (Hold down Ctrl and click each field one at a time, or click and drag the cursor to select many at once.)
3. Click the Alignment tab.
4. In the Size group, click the method of resizing.

As you can see, there’s no hard-and-fast rules for using these tools. They’re powerful and flexible — it’s a matter of improvising based on the edits and adjustments you need to make to the objects in your PDF files.

By Richard Crocker | Posted in tips | Comments (0)

How to tell if a PDF is a scan (and just an image) or has been OCR’d

How Text Works in OCR’d and Scanned PDF files

September 10, 2008 – 12:14 am

I recently asked our support team for some PDF-related concepts that they regularly found themselves explaining to customers. It turns out one of the most common discussions revolves around scanned and OCR’d PDF files. In particular, how text content works in both. Let’s take a look.

What is a scanned PDF file?

This question is not a trick. If you haven’t used a scanner before, it’s simply a PDF that’s been optically scanned and turned into a digitized replica of the original paper file. The obvious benefit of doing so is that once digitized it can be copied, shared and stored in multiple places.

In the case of text, however, for a simple scanned PDF document, it is not searchable and editable (with a PDF editor like Nitro Pro) the way you might expect — the text still part of the digitized image created during the scan.

What is OCR and what is an OCR’d PDF?

Optical character recognition (OCR) is the process of looking through one or more images, identifying patterns, and deducing from them where text-based content appears to be. The most common content to be OCR’d would be paper-based documents, publications, books, etc. that have been digitally scanned. But you could also OCR text-based electronic documents so as to make the text in the images in them searchable.

Once a PDF has been OCR’d, all (or almost all) of the text that was originally part of an image is ‘recognized’ and it becomes searchable and (at least somewhat) editable. For PDF files that have been OCR’d, there are two types of files you can encounter:

• Searchable images. In these PDF files, the appearance from the source file (normally a scanned file) is retained and looks the same (albeit a litt more grainy than the original as it’s a low quality scan), but an extra layer of text content has been added to the PDF. In the screenshot below, the grainy original image is still visible, yet the text can be searched (see how ‘download’ is highlighted). What’s really going on is that a transparent layer of text has been placed in the same position as the original scanned image that includes the text.

• Converted and formatted text. The other type of OCR’d PDF you might encounter is one that has discarded the original scanned image altogether. As a result, all text that was recognized, converted to real text, and formatted to look as close to the source file as possible. In the example below, you can see how much crisper and neater the text is. Editing text in this kind of OCR’d PDF is much easier than the type above, however the major trade-off you must accept is that it’s virtually impossible to get the content looking exactly the same as the source file — matching fonts, layout, etc. are all challenging. Also, retaining the scanned image layer means that less information will be lost from the original.

How to tell if a PDF is a scan (and just an image) or has been OCR’d

OCR’d files are never 100% accurate but these days they’re usually pretty close. This means that by searching for a keyword you can see in your PDF is the quickest way to tell if the file is scanned, or whether it has been OCR’d.

In Adobe Reader/Acrobat or Nitro PDF Professional, Press Ctrl+F, enter your keywords, and look for your keyword to be highlighted. If your search finds no words, it most probably indicates that the file is a scan that has not been OCR’d

The photo above was taken by npslibrarian and shared under a Creative Commons license.

Follow Us on Twitter

Follow Us on Twitter

October 9, 2008 – 2:44 pm

If you’re on Twitter already and want to stay in touch with the Nitro team, we recently opened our very own Twitter Nitro PDF account.

We’ve taken ourselves into the Twitter world for a couple of reasons: Firstly, as another way to let readers know about new posts on our PDF Blog. And secondly, as a way of keeping an eye out for users of both Nitro Pro and Twitter who might have feedback for us or need our help to get the most out of PDF and Nitro Pro.

Sign up or learn more

If you’re already a Twitter user and would like to follow us, visit our Nitro PDF page and click the Follow button. If you’re not on Twitter but would like to learn more, visit twitter.com for a quick tour.

By Richard Crocker | Posted in news | Comments (0)

Question from a customer: “Will Nitro Pro accept that PDF file?”

October 9, 2008 – 12:08 am

I was just scouring our sales inquires at the end of the day (something I like to do, see what questions and issues pre-sales are being asked) and noticed a question that is pretty straightforward for us PDF nerds, but I’m sure a others would think about it when considering a non-Adobe PDF solution.

Will Nitro compile an existing PDF file? If we have a previously existing pdf file of an eBook with pics and text, that is free of any extra security settings in Adobe, will Nitro accept that pdf file and work with it to set the security settings?

The answer is absolutely. PDF is now an ISO standard, and even before this happened (in 2007) the PDF specification was published by Adobe each time a version of Acrobat was released. So 3rd party developers are able to learn about the internals of a PDF and ensure they conform to that specification.

So yes, you can set security in Nitro Pro on a PDF that was created with Acrobat (or any other PDF creator for that matter). You can even remove security in Nitro Pro on a PDF that was secured with Acrobat (as long as you know the password!).

By Chris Dahl | Posted in knowledge, tips | Comments (0)

How to Convert Extra-Large Excel Spreadsheets to PDF

October 8, 2008 – 4:28 pm

One of my biggest pet PDF peeves is converting large Excel spreadsheets to PDF. None of the settings I’d expect to work, such as printing just the cells I have selected or adjustnig the print margins do a thing.

The problem appears when converting spreadsheets containing a large amount of rows, columns or both. Excel decides on the margins based on a standard paper size, but to make spreadsheets really usable once in PDF or paper form, often you need to shrink, expand, crop or adjust to get each sheet looking right.

Below I’ll look at a few ways to adjust things yourself, including a trick to manually set pages to break up pretty neatly. There’s a certain amount of trial and error in all this, but hopefully it’ll help you get out of those tough situations when trying to convert big spreadsheets to PDF. I’ve been tearing out a lot less hair lately!

These methods should work with any good PDF creator.

Print Area setting

In Microsoft Excel 2007 you might be tempted to play around with the Print Area settings (it is also included in previous versions of Excel). I wouldn’t don’t bother with it. It won’t help.

Adjust Page Breaks

Adjusting the page breaks is a nice quick solution when you find that a few columns or rows are being cut off and included on an extra page in your PDF. For me it works pretty well in Microsoft Excel 2007 but I’ve had less success with older versions of Excel.

Click the screenshot to see a page break being adjusted.

The basic idea here is for you to show Excel where the width and height of pages should be.

1. Open the file in Excel.
2. In the View ribbon tab, in the Workbook Views group, click Page Break Preview. (The page breaks should now be visible.)
3. Click on and drag the page break to include more or less columns or rows.
4. Once adjusted, use your PDF creator to make your PDF.

Scaling and page fitting content

The page scaling and fitting options have saved my hair on a lot occasions so I’m surprised that such useful functionality is buried away so deeply. There is more trial and error involved here, but with some patience you’ll get your content on the perfect number of pages.

Click on the screenshot to see the scale and fit-pages settings.

• Scale. This setting allows you to shrink or expand the contents of a sheet based on a percentage. If your content is a few too many columns and rows to fit on the normal page, then scaling down here should get your content on the page.
• Fit to pages. Ahhh … this is like an old friend to me — one who’s helped me through some very painful moments! It gives you extra control by allowing you to set the exact number of pages to use, with all content automatically scaling to fit into the pages you specify. For example, if you have a long spreadsheet that will take up 2 and a bit pages, just specify 2 pages and the content will be forced to fit.

You get to these features by heading to the Print Preview dialog. There are several ways to do this, but here’s the most obvious:

1. Open the Print dialog
2. Click Preview
3. Click Page Setup
4. In the Scaling group, update your settings
5. Click OK
6. Click Print
7. Choose your PDF printer to convert with
8. Click OK.

Hopefully these tips come in use. If you want to read about full Nitro Pro creation functionality, check out the create PDF files feature overview page on the Nitro site.

By Richard Crocker | Posted in knowledge, tips | Comments (0)

Fill PDF Forms without Form Fields

Fill PDF Forms without Form Fields

October 6, 2008 – 6:09 pm

There are two different kinds of PDF forms we all encounter from time to time: ‘dumb’ PDF forms that look like a form, but contain no form fields; and ’smart’ PDF forms, that contain active fields in which you can type, tick checkboxes, make calculations and more. The latter of course is the kind of form most of us would prefer, but in the real world not what we receive.

Today we’ll look at how you can edit dumb PDF forms on your computer instead of having to print them out to complete them. To work with these kinds of forms you need a PDF editor that supports text editing and/or creating forms.

Fill a PDF form with text fields

Using the Text Field form field is probably the best option if you may need make adjustments to the contents of form fields or even reuse the entire form later. Once the tool is selected, you can draw rectangles on the page(s) quickly where information must be entered, and afterwards enter all your details. Text fields have the added benefit of allowing you to update the appearance of multiple form fields at once.

For this example we’ll use Nitro PDF Professional, but you should be able to use any PDF form editor to get a similar result.

1. Open the form in Nitro Pro
2. On the Form ribbon tab, in the Fields group, click Text Field
3. Click and drag the cursor to size and place the text field
4. Repeat step 3 until all form fields are added
5. Switch back to the Hand tool
6. Enter your information into your fields.

Fill a PDF form with the Insert Text tool

The Insert Text tool removes the need to work with the form tools by allowing you to type anywhere on the page. If your form is simple and short, the Insert Text is probably your best option.

We’ll use Nitro Pro again in the example but most PDF editors that support text editing should work much the same.

1. Open the form in Nitro Pro
2. On the Insert and Edit ribbon tab, in the Text group, click Insert Text
3. Click on the page where you want to enter your information (you can move the position afterwards)
4. Optionally, update the appearance of the font type, size and color in the ribbon
5. Enter your information
6. Repeat the steps above for each separate form entry.

Coming soon …

Nitro Pro has more features coming soon that will make filling out dumb PDF forms even easier. These include an enhanced Insert Text tool that allows you to set your default text properties (including type, size and color) and an improved Text Box tool that allows you to use it like the typewriter tool found in some other PDF applications. If you haven’t already, subscribe above to our blog or newsletter and we’ll notify you when these features become available.

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PDF editor

Edit PDF files with the PDF editor

Product overview

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With Nitro PDF Professional's comprehensive set of tools to edit PDF files, there's less need to switch between different applications to manage and update the contents of your PDF files.

As a PDF editor, Nitro PDF Professional gives you the complete tool set to edit any text, graphics, pages, security, links, bookmarks, and metadata contained in your PDF files, allowing you to prepare PDF files that are ready and optimized for distribution. Best of all, with Nitro PDF Professional you can edit documents made from any PDF creation tool, including those originally produced in Adobe^® Acrobat^®.

Edit text in PDF

Fix typos directly on your PDF files instead of going back to the source file in another application (such as Microsoft^® Word, Excel^®, or WordPerfect). You can change the type of font face, size and color of existing text, correct word and character spacings, and insert new text straight into your PDF files. When you need the PDF editor to insert text across more than one page at a time, use the header, footer and Bates number tools to insert permanent text, numbering and dynamic text like date, author, title and more.

Key features:

• Edit text inside PDF files
• Insert text into PDF files
• Insert headers & footers
• Add Bates numbering

Edit graphics & images in PDF

For last minute changes to images in PDF files, Nitro PDF Professional's advanced image editing tools enable you to select, move, resize, rotate, copy, paste, and delete. To insert images into one or more pages - with full control over the final appearance, size, opactity and more - Nitro Pro allows you to add images as watermarks or overlays.

Key features:

• Insert, delete, replace, extract images
• Resize and crop images
• Edit image properties, including resolution, brightness, contrast, and color space
• Add stamps and watermarks

Interactivity in PDF

Adding bookmarks and links to your PDF files makes them easier to use and navigate. By applying an action to a PDF bookmark or link you can make your document much easier to navigate. Users can quickly jump to other pages in the PDF file, or to web pages. The Nitro Pro PDF editor includes industry-leading tools for automating the process of bookmark and link creation, as well as tools to manually edit the appearance and actions of individual bookmarks and links.

Key features:

• PDF bookmarks
• PDF links

Edit PDF properties & optimize file size

Editing document properties (including metadata) and removing unwanted objects from a PDF will produce a more professional, client-ready PDF file. With Nitro PDF Professional's optimization tool, you can compress images and remove objects such as form fields, annotations, bookmarks, JavaScript and more to produce a smaller size PDF file. For documents that may be indexed for searching, adding information to metadata fields will aid search filtering, and choosing 'initial view' settings (such as the magnification level) will allow you to customize how the PDF file appears when opened.

Key features:

• Optimize & shrink PDF files
• Set the document information metadata
• Set the Initial View

More information

See the assemble & combine files section to learn about page editing tools.

memodifikasi friendster dengan karakter sendiri

Tips Merubah layout Friendster dGn foto/Gambar kita sendiri

1.Siapkan foto/ gambar terbaik kita..formete jpeg tentunya..

2.Selanjutnya Upload foto kamu di web server terserah dimana aj boleh.Kemudian copy alamat foto kamu yang http://.....itu loooh..??? .(Bila kamu kesulitan krim saja gambar kamu ke e-mail serulthz@yahoo.co.id saya bantu dalam menguploadnya dan nanti q krimkan alamatnya ke kamu)

3.Trus U buka aj friendster kamu dan login dunk..??masuk ke menu profile - edit profile

4.Kemudian pada my profile pilih costumize. dan perhatikan pada Advanced costumization terutama pada Customize Css Perhatikan alamat yang saya tandai tersebut..

5.Langkah terakhir gantilah alamat tersebut dengan alamat foto / gambar yang telah kamu upload tadi..kemudian klik save..dan lihatlah hasil kerja kamU..!!!