Having worked in the PDF industry for the past six years I’d forgotten that a lot of people — especially web developers — probably don’t know that JavaScript is supported within PDFs. Well it is and Sitepoint has published an article that talks about Javascript in PDFs from the perspective of people who have previously mainly worked with JavaScript in a web browser.

As Trevor Cook pointed out today in his Crikey blog, it wasn’t so long ago that people were predicating newspapers would only last another few decades — now of course that predication looks rather generous. On top of all the gloomy talk on blogs and in the media about the decline of newspapers, Jon Stewart has also chipped in with a little humor:

Will the major newspapers, as we currently know them, still exist in two years?

Linux hasn’t received much attention from the PDF world over the years and it’s not hard to understand why. First, Linux relies on open source developers (i.e. people doing stuff for free) and PDF creators, editors and viewers don’t appear to be on the priority list.

It’s a common refrain on forums and blogs: “Adobe Reader is bloatware”. Usually followed by a recommendation to use Foxit Reader on Windows or Linux and the built-in Preview feature on Mac OSX. Some of the criticism is fair; but most of it is not.

Adobe has added an Acrobat channel to Adobe TV. The channel includes tips and tricks from PDF experts at Adobe, as well customer stories — aka infomercials — from large companies that use Acrobat and PDF in their work-flows.

We covered the Xerox Travel Scanner a couple of months ago, but since we hadn’t actually tried it ourselves yet, we weren’t able any details on how usable it is. Luckily a visitor has been kind enough to share their experience with this compact scanner:
Comment by Floris on November 29, 2008 @ 10:14 am
I bought one of these the other day. It’s a very cute scanner – definitely “laptop” size. But you can get a positive story from the Xerox website so let me tell the other side:
The bundled software …

Nitro PDF Software has released version 5.5 of Nitro PDF Professional. The updated version, which is available for immediate download, includes numerous bug fixes, performance improvements and some new features.

I have been an Eee PC owner for almost a year now. For most of that time I used the default Linux operating system, Xandros, before switching to Ubuntu, and then to Windows. What I discovered after making that final switch is that for me personally, Windows makes the Eee PC a lot more usable. You see, I had slipped into the habit of only using the Eee PC as a Kindle-like device for reading e-books, instead of actually using it to do some, you know, work. This wasn’t because …

Rosebud PLM has had its patent for the “Method and Software for enabling N-way collaboration over the Network for Computers” approved by the US Patent and Trademark Office. The Rosebud tool is based around using Adobe Acrobat, and SaaS (Software as a Service). It allows you to present a PDF file, review it and edit it amongst multiple participants.

If you’re concerned whether your documents meet the requirements set by the PDF/A standard, you can use the free online service from Solid Documents.