Gadgetopia

Beyond PDF: Digital Delivery Develops: Interesting article on the future of the PDF and competing platforms that have developed to knock PDF of its perch. Yet it has its share of critics who complain that it's not the most effective digital distribution method. Among its most famous broadsides was Jakob ...

dompdf - The PHP 5 HTML to PDF Converter: Someone mentioned this over in the post on Prince. It looks quite good -- they have a demo page where you can enter HTML in a box, then generate a PDF real-time. I tried it -- it respects all CSS and ...

PDF for Lawyers: Talk about a niche blog. PDF for Lawyers: How to use PDFs in the practice of law Tips & Techniques" What's the most specific blog you've ever seen?

Feds help create PDF archiving standard: We've written about this initiative before. Looks like it's moving ahead. The committee hopes to release a draft of the PDF/A standard by early next year with a final standard out by the end of 2005, said committee member Stephen Levenson, who works in ...

PDF-A: A New Digital Preservation Format: There's a new movement to persuade Adobe to freeze a subset of the PDF format and guarantee its integrity for a certain number of years so that archivists can ensure people can access the content in the future. "Despite its advantages, PDF itself is ...

R&OS: pdf class: Here's an insanely well-done PHP class for creating PDFs on the fly. Ridiculously simple. Written by a Kiwi, no less. We rule.

Here's something that's been in the back of my mind for a couple of weeks, but it hasn't been pressing enough to really dig into research. So I'm going to be lazy and throw the question out here. If you take a document from Word or whatever and convert it ...

Digital Inspiration: Convert doc, xls, ppt, rtf, pdf to HTML: Brutally simple hack to get a ton of different document formats into HTML: send them to a GMail account as an attachment, then "View as HTML." GMail will show the following types of files as HTML: .pdf, .doc, .xls, .ppt, ...

Prince: Overview: There's a big gap in getting Web content into print. I've had to cross the gap a couple times, and I've both generated PDFs server-side and used CSS to style HTML into printable format. Both methods suck. Prince is a system that lets you take XML, style it ...

Convert PDF, HTML, DOC, TIFF and more: So, your office needs to produce simple PDFs, but you don't want to pay $450 for a retail copy of Acrobat? First, of all, don't pay it because their are a number of alternatives like RoboPDF that are so much cheaper. They don't ...

Word docs from Movable Type: I have to say that Microsoft is doing some great things with the new underlying XML format in Office 2003 and up. Using that functionality, the guys at Movable Type's Pronet published a simple template that outputs Word ML, and thus creates what's essentially a ...

I'm embarking on a (very cool) project to port an app from SQL Server to Postgres. To this end, I need to get up-to-speed on Postgres stored procs. I looked around for some good books. Joseph Scott -- Postgres champion that he is -- recommended a few as well. However, ...

PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption (Alertbox): Tough to argue with any of this, though it will no doubt cause an uproar. "Users get lost inside PDF files, which are typically big, linear text blobs that are optimized for print and unpleasant to read and navigate online. PDF is good for ...

Generate PDFs with PHP: Here's a solid how-to about generate PDFs from PHP. As someone who learned how to do this with no guide other than a function library and a boatload of trial-and-error, I can tell you that this one is worth your time.

CutePDF - Create PDF for free: A good, free PDF printer without any pop-ups (like PDF995, for instance). Can't find a downside yet.

Adobe is expanding the Acrobat line. In my job, we work with PDFs a lot and I think Acrobat is a piece of software taken way too much for granted. If you really dig into it, it's pretty amazing what it can do. It's good to see Adobe dropping the ...

Seen on MacSlash: Safari supports the use of the PDF format for images in HTML pages. This means that if you insert a pdf file in a web page with an 'img' tag it will show up just like a .jpg or .gif in Safari. This makes sense given that ...

The Long Now Foundation: library: This is a really good essay on the lack of longevity with digital media. It's not just the media itself that degrades, but the file formats. Computer scientist Danny Hillis notes that we have good raw data from previous ages written on clay, on stone, ...

Macromedia FlashPaper: A very cool use of Flash. With FlashPaper, you can "print" a document to SWF format, retaining all the formatting (just like PDF). However, unlike PDF, you can embed it in a Web page in its own little frame, instead of having it be its own document and ...

Open New Windows for PDF and other Non-Web Documents: Nielsen dictates an exception to his "open no new browser windows" rule. Seems like a good point to me. When using PC-native file formats such as PDF or spreadsheets, users feel like they're interacting with a PC application. Because users are ...

I'm not working from a Windows box as much as I used to these days, so maybe I'm a little too blissfully isolated from the sheer volume of crap that most of you put up with from your computer each day. Tonight, though, I was working from my wife's PC ...

Giving some thought today to "printer friendly" versions of Web pages. This isn't a tutorial or anything, just a consideration of the options. There are essentially three ways to do them. (1) Using a Separate Page If you're running your site from a database or other central data store, this ...

In an attempt to gauge perceived innovation in the marketplace, Cheskin and Fitch Worldwide conducted a survey of corporate CEO's, and just released their report. You can download a pdf version of the report from Fitch Worldwide (if you can find your way through the maze they call a home ...

Prompted by Microsoft's generosity, I've started reading e-books, and I think I'm addicted. I read a book last year called "The Social Life of Information" which put forth all sorts of reasons why e-books weren't going to work. I agreed with it then, but after actually trying it, I'm hooked. ...

I've been playing around with PDFMoto for a few days now, and I've found it to be a really well-done program. It allows you to auto-publish an entire directory of documents as PDFs in a remote location. You dump a bunch of documents in a local folder, and it monitors ...

Do you put more value on information you pay for? Do you pay more attention to something you paid, say $5 for, than something you read for free on the Net? A friend and I were having this conversation the other day, partly related to my post from a couple ...

Wikipedia:WikiReader: Another little-known construct of Wikipedia. WikiReaders are collections of articles from Wikipedia on a certain topic, in the form of PDFs published for download and intended to be printed, and also to be sold in printed form. Here's a script to do the PDF conversion.

Adobe Digital Media Store: Adobe has started selling e-books in order to pump up its PDF format as a viable alternative to formats from Microsoft and Palm. They may be able to fill some of the vacuum left by Barnes and Noble when they left the market.

Two Selections from Seth Godin: I stumbled on this e-book over at Amazon. It's a short, free, PDF from Seth Godin (Permission Marketing, Purple Cow) about an attempt to improve a specific Web site that sells CD duplication services. Godin claims that too many designers just put up a site ...

I bought a new car stereo as a gift for my daughter's 18th birthday (dang I feel old!) and thought I'd just take it home & install it myself. I did that sort of thing pretty regularly back in my single days, and thought it might be a fun Saturday ...

Acrobat...to Support Full XML Digital Editions: More information on the changes coming to Adobe Acrobat. XML is great. "...a website that is XML-compatible could automatically display as HTML elements the text, illustrations, or entire pages or chapters of 'Adobe Reader' PDF documents. Likewise, Adobe's new software would be able to ...

XML Paper Specification: Overview: XPS is Microsoft's planned competitor to PDF. I wonder if Dell is miffed about the name? The XML Paper Specification describes the XPS Document format. A document in XPS Document format (XPS Document) is a paginated representation of electronic paper described in an XML-based format. The ...

Jakob Nielsen is on The Screen Savers right now railing against PDFs. He makes a good case. This is a follow-up to his previously-posted diatribe on the subject. To clarify, Nielsen isn't against PDFs altogether. In fact, he sells many reports in PDF format (I even bought one once). He ...

Adobe Acrobat Reader 7.0: Acrobat Reader 7.0 is out, and it sounds like it's much less aggravating. Adobe have finally got around to addressing the biggest single problem with the Acrobat Reader - startup speed. In my web-browser (Firefox), Version 7.0 startup is quicker than I ever remember it being. ...

I got to thinking the other day: exactly when do you have a content management system? We ve all built apps that manage content, but when do you graduate from a relational database with an admin section (RDBWAAS) to the lofty and deserved title of content management system? (Incidentally, I ...

MOOX :: Welcome to my Werxshop...: This guy custom compiles Mozilla apps for various platforms. If I'm reading his analysis (PDF) correctly, he's claiming 10-20% rendering speed increases for various Intel processors. I am currently releasing four versions, or "M" builds M0, M1, M2, and M3, of the Firefox ...

Archives: The New York Times: The New York Times has opened up their archive from 1891 to 1995, the year they went online. When you find an article, you can read the first paragraph, but the rest of it will cost you about a buck. Search the Article Archive: 1851-1995 ...

Me and Joe are featured in eZ publish s Share Magazine for April. They did an interview, and there s a snazzy picture of us. What comes out of the box with eZ Publish is just a starting point. Don’t be afraid to extend the platform, through custom classes, extensions, template operators, ...

How many emails are sent each day?: From the Useless Trivia That We Love To Speculate On Anyway department. VeriSign (the exclusive registry for .com and .net domains) estimates (PDF) that there are about 2.25 billion email queries per day. However, because of caching, email queries represent only a fraction ...

RSS in Government: Arkansas Government eNewsroom: This is encouraging. Arkansas has joined the growing number of states syndicating agency produced headlines for its citizenry using RSS. The Arkansas Government eNewsRoom is a news portal featuring a RSS 0.91 feed that indexes news releases in PDF format. I saw a bit ...

Macromedia - Macromedia Central: I think this has the potential to be huge. Macromedia Central is a single user interface (code-named "Halo") into which Flash and Shockwave applications can be "plugged." If you write an app, you can include an XML file that explains how it's to be paid for, ...

Bush Site Unplugs Poster Tool: The Bush-Cheney campaign recently disabled a feature of their Web site: The tool originally let users generate a full-size campaign poster in PDF format, customized with a short slogan of their choice. But Bush critics began using the site to place their own snarky political ...

Adobe Acrobat Reader upgrades, adds new tricks: This sounds like bloat, what what did we expect? Acrobat and Flash together have more saturation than any other software -- even Windows, I'd guess. When you have that kind of distribution network, you can pretty much do whatever you want. Acrobat 8, ...

TAFFI (Thumb And ForeFinger Interface) is, in the words of its creator, "an inspired hack". Andy Wilson of Microsoft Research wrote an algorithm that uses a cheap USB camera connected to his PC to allow him to control the computer with his hands held over the keyboard. No mouse or ...

"Information Architecture for the World Wide Web" is considered one of the definitive books for developing usable, intelligently laid-out, easy-to-use Web sites. Peter Morville and Louis Rosenfield wrote the first edition in 1997 and it aged exceptionally well, even with the break-neck speed of technology. I read it in 2001 ...

Getting Real: The smarter, faster, easier way to build a successful web application: Nineteen dollars for the PDF. No print version. Getting Real details the business, design, programming, and marketing principles of 37signals. The book is packed with keep-it-simple insights, contrarian points of view, and unconventional approaches to software design. ...

CNN.com Specials: These new CNN commercials are hysterical, but that's not the point (but they are funny as all get out think of the ESPN SportsCenter commercials, just about CNN...) They have me wondering about the future of embedded video formats like Real, Quicktime, and Windows Media. These clips ...

Application UI goes back to basics: Jon Udell discovers WriteRoom, and makes an important point. I'm writing this column on a Mac-based imitation of a 1970s green-screen terminal. Hog Bay Software's WriteRoom, a free program for Mac OS X, advertises "distraction free writing" as its In WriteRoom's default full-screen mode ...

Blend Interactive is a certified partner of the eZ publish content management system. eZ Systems, the company behind eZ publish, sells commercial support for the system. However, this is sometimes (often, actually) hard to explain to potential customers. It s commercial but it s open-source huh? To try and solve this, we wrote a ...

I found a peach of a tool today it was exactly what I was looking for at exactly the right time. We have a central database at my company, and the guys have been bugging me to work up some enhanced printing for it. They want to be able ...

Apparently I'm not the only one who gets annoyed with people yakking into cell phones in public places. The guys at Draplindustries Design Co. have come up with what might be a fun solution, of sorts. Introducing SHHH, the Society for HandHeld Hushing. That's right. We're tired of having to ...

Zan Image Printer: This is an awfully handy little app. It's like a PDF printer driver, but it prints to BMP, JPG, or TIFF. Great for when you need to extract images from odd document formats (CAD in particular) to include in other media. To us, it's well worth the ...

Note on December 27, 2006 A long time ago (2002-ish), I worked with Documentum. I figured out how to do something, and I posted it as this blog entry. The links to the attached files were broken for a long time, and I would get about one email a month ...

O'Reilly Network Safari Bookshelf: This is part of Safari Online, of which I'm a member and big fan. Sometimes you just can't wait for the book. When you need to learn a new technology right now, turn to the Rough Cuts service from Safari Books Online. You'll get early access ...

Macromedia - Contribute: Contribute 3 is out. Macromedia claims "300 enhancements," but I can't find a list. There's an impressive list of features here, but it doesn't break out what's new in this version. I did see some neat stuff that I hadn't seen before, like FrontPage Extension compatibility, WEBDAV ...

It's possible to ditch Microsoft Office: I actually used OpenOffice (used as opposed to played with, which I've done a number of times) the other day to write a document. It was fantastic. In many respects, better than Word. I'll admit that a lot of my desire to use Linux ...

Here's a scary statistic that I hadn't considered before: SANS keeps a graph of the amount of time you can have an unprotected PC on the Internet before you get some kind of exploit probe. Since last year, this time has gone from 40-60 minutes down to around 20-30 minutes, ...

We found a gem poking around on the corporate network the other day: a PDF of "The History of Programming Languages", a poster by O'Reilly that shows 50 programming languages and their timelines and interrelationships. Chris posted back in March about the progenitor of this chart, Éric Lévénez's Computer Languages ...

Popout Prism: Those nutty folks over at Xerox PARC have come up with a tool to make finding information in Web pages easier (within one page only it's not a search engine). Check the image below. You bring up a Web page, then enter a keyword, and that keyword ...

Dan Geer, the CTO of a consulting firm called @Stake, co-wrote a paper (PDF) criticizing Microsoft's market dominance. The paper has been getting a lot of press. Here's an excerpt: "Over the years, Microsoft has deliberately added more and more features into its operating system in such a way that ...

Talking about metadata, like cooking with metafood: It's actually pretty eerie that I stumbled on this post because I had been thinking about this exact thing: when is something "metadata" and when is it just "data"? Technical conversations about information and data can sometimes include the word "metadata," which commonly ...

Welcome to Monopoly.com!: This may seem a odd thing for a tech blog to write about, but it's a perfect example of a great use of the Internet. "The more money you have, the easier it is to own it all so print your own! Just click on the ...

SCO has extended its campaign to squeeze blood from a Linux server to Linux users this week by suing Autozone for its use of the OS. The best part? The court they're filing the suit in will manage the case using Linux. However, the defence may take heart that the ...

I stopped at the library over lunch today looking for a book. A search of the catalog system -- browser-based by the way -- showed just what I was looking for, except that it was in a Collection called "Ebooks", it's status was "Web Access", and that I had to ...

I'd just like to give a quick hats off to the guys over at PKWare. They make PKZip, which is a zip utility. Now, I know you use WinZip because of its unlimited trial period, but when you outgrow that, PKZip is a fantastic tool. The strongest asset of PKZip ...

PowerGREP: Windows grep Software: I know that search and replace tools aren't anything new, but PowerGrep is far and away the best one I've ever seen for Windows. PowerGREP is a powerful grep tool for quickly searching through large numbers of text and binary files, such as software source code, ...

Piracy is Progressive Taxation, and Other Thoughts on the Evolution of Online Distribution: The O'Reilly Network is making great strides in e-book publishing with their Safari service. I've been a customer of Safari in the past, and I found it very good. In this article from last year, Tim O'Reilly ...

A few weeks ago, I read a good article on paper prototyping over at Jakob Nielsen's site. And then the other day, I wrote a bit about how overall application design and interface was more of an influence on an app's success than the actual code behind it. So, in ...

ImageMagick - Convert, Edit, and Compose Images: I just want to give a little recognition to ImageMagick, which is a free image manipulation library that's been around for years. I downloaded a new version the other day, and I'm so impressed at what it can do. ImageMagickTM 6.0.2 is a ...

... to a brand new G5! At work we're looking at installing a new archive server that will run on a shiny new Mac G5 (woohoo!) Since the server closet is getting a little crowded I was thinking that it would work nicely to put the thing in a rack. ...

I worked on improving the search on this site today. Search has been through a number of iterations. First, I used the basic Movable Type search. But it was slow and I wanted to do some interesting things with search. So last year, I switched to using a SQL "LIKE" ...

A trend I've been seeing lately is distribution of print publications in "reader" software thats presents them just as they were printed. This goes beyond just PDF entire magazines and newspapers are being pushed to readers with their own software for viewing them. I tried two such solutions, and ...

My office is considering buying a new copier/printer. Have you looked at these things lately? I've been through a half-dozen vendor presentations in the last few days (they talk a long time when the price tag approaches $20K), and I can't believe the functionality available. One vendor dropped off a ...

What is it with the geek novels these days? It all started with Stealing the Network. This book is a novel and security primer rolled up into one. Stealing the Network is a book of science fiction. It's a series of short stories about characters who gain unauthorized access to ...

phpMyAdmin is usually installed quickly, out of acute necessity. You need to do something with your database, and you can't do it via telnet or SSH or anything else, so you download the latest version, FTP it up, and away you go. More often than not, the install is forgotten ...

(Note: the audio for this post is here.) We had a build meeting the other day for a client s site, and we walked through the site map to determine what content types we were going to need to pull this off. In these cases, the first content type you ...