I recently came across a very interesting article from the School of Information at the University of Texas. The article, Indexing Digital (Electronic) Documents — It’s Not an Option; Pay Now or Pay (More) Later, explores the differences between field-based and full-text-based indexing and explains why they recommend using both. They also cover:
Tangible and intangible organizational benefits of indexing digital documents are outlined. The various costs associated with indexing are detailed, and specific price information from service bureaus is presented. Recommendations for choosing an EDMS are included, as well as a model for assessing the …

Josh Catone over at Sitepoint takes a look at how digitizing paper is becoming a new cottage industry:
If you’re like me, you have a filing cabinet full of paper. Health insurance forms, utility bills, car service records, tax receipts, etc. It piles up fast and keeping track of it all is something of a pain in the butt. For virtual teams, with employees scattered around the globe, the pain caused by piles of paper can be more pronounced. Over the past year or two, a handful of startups have emerged …

Sony have released a 43 page guide on how to best create PDF files for the Sony Reader. Topics include:

Creating PDFs from Word Processing Documents
Creating PDFs from Presentations
Creating PDFs from Professional Layout Applications

The Sony Reader guide for creating optimized PDF content can be downloaded from here.

A new blog post from NiXPS, XPS Variable Data example with the NiXPS SDK, details how NiXPS SDK can be used to combine an XPS template and data pulled from a database.
This process is called variable data processing and saves you time and money when you need to fill out the same template (e.g. an Invoice form) multiple times — with every occurrence using changing data.
From XPS Variable Data example with the NiXPS SDK:
The reason I say that XPS really shines here, is for a few reasons:
It is very easy (and free) to …

Previously we’ve covered online PDF search engine PDFoo.com, but now it appears that there are a number of other online PDF search engines appearing on the scene. A recent blog post, PDF Search Engines Begin to Emerge, from Investintech, talks about three other options:

Data-Sheet
Pdfgeni.com 
pdf Search Engine 
PDFoo.com

All of these search engines allow you to search PDF content online and provide a more targeted and smaller results page than Google.
Do they provide better results than Google? I will let you be the judge of that.

Now about 10 months from its release in mid-to-late November in 2007 — enough time has passed to see what people really think of Amazon’s Kindle.
For those who haven’t owned one, used one, or otherwise seen one – you can find a floating copy of the original introduction video here on YouTube - The Amazon Kindle.
I’ve read through a slew of reviews ranging from the unimpressed, well-thought out response of “meh”, to the equal expression of literary genius, “it’s amazing” … and consequently compiled a (relatively) even-handed list below of more detailed …

On Wednesday, September 17, 2008, The Acrobat User Community Team will be hosting an eSeminar on how to drop a flash file inside a PDF without the need for any additional media players.

Do you like listening to podcasts? Do you like PDFs? Do you work with PDFs? If you answered yes to both questions, then I have got some good news for you: Acrobat Technical Evangelist, Joel Geraci, will soon be starting The PDF Developer Junkie Podcast.
The podcast will be audience driven and will rely on listeners to email in recorded questions about developing with PDF.
I will post a link to the podcast as soon as the first episode is live.

I just want to quickly spotlight two very useful posts today on text in PDFs, and OCR’d scanned images. 
The first is from Jonathan Bowman’s AEC & EPC Blog where he covers how to covert scanned images to PDF and then OCR them, using Adobe Acrobat:
The first step is to simply locate the scanned image and then convert it to pdf.  Now there are several ways to do this, such as File – Create PDF – From File, right click on document and choose convert to PDF, or just simple drag …

Plastic Logic have announced a new electronic-reading device aimed at the business market.
The device mirros a 8.5 x 11-inch sheet of paper in size, is thinner than a pad of paper, has built-in wireless, and unlike the Kindle, will include native support for a number of common file types:
The Plastic Logic reader supports a full range of business document formats, such as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint, and Adobe PDFs, as well as newspapers, periodicals and books.
Plastic Logic’s research indicates that professionals tend to read more business content than recreational content, …

How can you tell when you’ve really made the jump from “hold-in-your-hands-paper” to “batteries-not-included-digital” – for me it came in a few phases.
Phase 1 – from back in the early 80s, I never handwrote anything – well except when I absolutely had no choice. And of course, this explains why I’ve had many art nouveau-collectors approach me to buy my painfully scribbled shopping lists for tens of thousands of dollars.
Phase 2 - I recall when I was in university back in the early 90s, sitting through lectures (well, sometimes …

I’ve had a (long) long-time interest in ebooks — back in 2000, I even devised a device called the Paper-Simulator 3000 (almost patent pending) — its main aim was to provide a method by which paper-book-addicts could migrate across to ebook reading. 
Complete with a strap on leather binder, dried-ink odour dispenser, and a motorised random paper-cut module it really was quite an ‘idea-of-the-day’.
But 8 years later, it seems it’s just not required… people are just (generally) happy to read ebooks — and are becoming more so. And not just on …

As you’d well know, you can grab the latest “news” from a plethora of sources on a variety of devices — email, web, phone, whatever…. some of the technophobic amongst us even use paper!
But what do you do when you want the oldest news — back before the Gold Rush (well, perhaps not quite that long ago). Well, if Google has their way, it’ll be stored in their Google News Archive – as they work hand-in-hand with publishers to digitize their content — ripe and ready for you to search through. …

Despite decades of talk about the fabled paperless office, consumption of paper has continued to grow exponentially. In Australia, 1.4 million tonnes of printing and fine paper are used every year, with the average paper document being copied 19 times. And to add insult to injury, it’s estimated that only 11% of office paper is being recycled.
Enter Project Paper-less. An organization that’s making an audacious call-to-action for Australians to take up the challenge of reducing their paper usage at home and in the office.
Project Paper-less aims to:
Project Paper-less aims to …

Adobe have announced plans to immediately discontinue the development of FlashPaper… Although some once touted FlashPaper as a PDF-killer, it never really fulfilled it’s promise in that regard. And, as you can imagine, any lingering PDF-killer thoughts, were quickly laid to rest when Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005.