Tracker Software has seen a massive increase in demand for its products in the last 2 years and this has allowed it to provide comprehensive tools for PDF creation and manipulation for non-commercial users without any need to make a charge.

PDF-XChange Lite creates ISO-compliant PDF files which can be further edited, concatenated and printed. PDF-XChange Lite supports fast rendering of embedded fonts and graphics, multi-language and is claimed to be quicker as compared to other similar products in the market. PDF-XChange Lite is supported on all of the major Windows Operating Systems.

PDF-XChange Lite can be downloaded for free from http://www.tracker-software.com/product/downloads

The press release appeared at http://www.prweb.com/releases/2010/11/prweb4724614.htm

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PDF-XChange now available for free for creating PDFs

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The Print Production Bundle will provide the designers, printers and publishers with a comprehensive quality-assured solution. The new print bundle is available only for a limited time until 30th November 2010 and is discounted by 20%. It is an exclusive deal available through DistributorX’s reseller channel.

Check more about DistributorX at https://www.distributorx.com/index.lasso

The news appeared at http://www.overnightprints.com/news/print-production-bundle-made-available-in-u-s-through-distributorx-resellers-51264

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DistributorX announces a new Print Production Bundle for US market

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Bluebeam PDF Revu is used by world’s leading manufacturing, design and construction firms for PDF creation, markup and editing. It has enabled organisations to reduce paper usage and fees by 80%, and improve productivity by 60%.

Bluebeam Software has recently announced a new partnership with Bluebeam AB, a Swedish consulting firm, to improve its support to its European customers. Also, earlier this year in March, a Swedish version of Bluebeam PDF Revu 8 was released for Swedish construction industry.

The current version of Bluebeam PDF Revu is 8.5. A free trial version is also available for download. Read more on Bluebeam PDF Revu at  http://www.bluebeam.com/

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Bluebeam releases a German version of its PDF Editor

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The new or enhanced key features of PDF Studio 6.5 includes:

• Handling multiple documents with batch capabilities, support for drag-and-drop of pages, copy-and-paste of images and text
• New annotation type added for Callout
• New Calibration tool for measurement and setting scales
• New Shortcuts and Bookmark-style quick access capabilities
• New capability to manage Digital Signatures

PDF Studio 6.5 is based on Qoppa’s proprietary PDF technology and offers features such as editing PDFs, filling PDF forms, reviewing and commenting, creating digital signatures and assembling documents. PDF Studio offers a low-cost alternative to Adobe Acrobat.

PDF Studio 6.5 is a cross-platform software that runs on Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. It is available in Standard and Pro Edition. A free trial copy is available for download at http://www.qoppa.com/pdfstudio/index.html

The news appeared at http://macmegasite.com/node/13082?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+macmegasite+%28MacMegasite+-+Mac+Community+News%29

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Qoppa releases enhanced PDF Studio 6.5

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NovusOffice is available in Standard and Premium edition. The Premium NovusOffice features PDF Editor which allows users to create, view and edit PDF documents. Users can also mark-up, add images, add shapes, create and fill forms and convert Office files into PDF documents.

NovusOffice is fully-compatible with other commonly used office applications and supports formats including DOC, PDF, HTML, XLS, PPT and others.

The recommended system requirements for NovusOffice are

A 30-day trial version of NovusOffice is available at https://www.novusoffice.com/downloads.aspx. Check more details on NovusOffice at https://www.novusoffice.com/default.aspx

The press release appeared at http://www.newswiretoday.com/news/77752/

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A new Office suite released which includes PDF Editor

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Proview 1.2 provides a simple user interface to edit existing or create new PDF documents. The new features included in updated version are:

• Twice as fast when compared to previous version
• Visual selection for cropping
• Individual pages can be edited separately

Proview 1.2 provides the following capabilities:

• Merge several documents
• Split PDF documents, incl. split at bookmark boundaries
• Delete or remove individual pages from PDF documents
• Insert file into an existing document
• Insert blank pages into a document
• Build a new PDF document from scratch, incl. adding text with choice of fonts, colors, etc
• Format the lines such as thicken or blacken the lines
• Shift or rotate page contents
• Flip pages
• Crop pages

Proview 1.2 requires Mac OS X 10.5 or higher and 3.5MB Hard disk but supports Intel only. A single-user license of Proview is priced at USD 40.00.

A fully-functional trial copy of Proview 1.2 is available for free at http://www.coherentpdf.com/proview.html

The press release appeared at http://prmac.com/release-id-15561.htm

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New version of Proview PDF Editor for Mac released

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The new features or capabilities included in Foxit Phantom PDF Suite 2.1 are:

• OCR Text Recognition
• PDF Creation specification from PDF standard 1.3 to PDF standard 1.7
• Create and manage digital signature fields
• Add headers, footers and watermarks
• Search for words in comments and bookmarks
• Improved stamp tool

A free 30-day trial copy of Foxit Phantom PDF Suite 2.1 is available for download from http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/phantom

The press release appeared at http://www.prlog.org/10848872-foxit-releases-foxit-phantom-pdf-suite-21-now-includes-ocr-text-recognition.html

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Foxit announces its Phantom PDF Suite 2.1 with OCR text recognition

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PDFpen 4.7 includes a new feature of ‘Save to Evernote’ which prompts users to login to Evernote and save the PDF document with the name and note title. This would enable PDFpen users to leverage Evernote’s capabilities to store their PDFs and access these documents from web browser, iPhone or iPad.

PDFpen 4.7 is also available in Professional Edition which provides additional capabilities such as Fillable forms, Table of Content and few others.

PDFpen and PDFpenPro requires Mac OS X 10.4 or later. An Intel 1.8 Ghz processor or above is recommended for OCR. Direct scanning requires Mac OS X 10.6.

The detailed list of features of PDFpen 4.7 is available at http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/features.html

The demo versions are available at http://www.smileonmymac.com/PDFpen/download.html.

The news appeared at http://www.macobserver.com/tmo/article/pdfpen_4.7_gets_evernote_support/

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PDFpen 4.7 now includes support for Evernote

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The Studio allows the professionals to chat and simultaneously post markups to a shared PDF copy using Bluebeam’s industry-standard redlining tools such as clouds, callouts, CAD symbols and measurements. The software ensures that each and every activitiy during the collaboration session is tracked as a record and available for review at any later time. Studio also enables real-time update of the view of the shared PDF across all attendees as the presenter zooms, pans or redlines.

Studio is offered as a new feature to Bluebeam PDF Revu 8.5, the latest version of PDF editor for design and construction industry.  Studio can be downloaded from http://www.bluebeam.com/downloads

The press release appeared at http://www.earthtimes.org/articles/show/studio-real-time-collaboration-pdf,1338947.shtml

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Bluebeam introduces Studio for collaboration on PDF files

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PDFNet SDK 5  supports creation, content extraction, editing, viewing and printing of PDFs. The development toolkit is used by software developers to improve integration, performance and control of PDFs in their commercial applications and enterprise workflows. The new version features universal document conversion and enhanced PDF/A conversion through two new add-on modules named Convert Add-on and PDF/A Add-on.

The new Convert Add-on module offers Universal conversion API based on XPS print path to convert any printable document format to PDF, XPS, EMF or SVG. The new PDF/A Add-on module enables direct PDF to PDF/A conversion and supports PDF/A-1a and PDF/A-1b.

PDFNet SDK 5 implements a number of direct converters to preserve the quality of text, vector graphics, hyperlinks, colours and fonts. PDFNet SDK 5 also seamlessly integrates with Microsoft Office while maintaining metadata, text and links when converting from Word, Excel, Outlook or PowerPoint to PDF or XPS.

The news appeared at http://www.documentmanagementnews.com/the-news/general-news/41-general-news/595-pdftron-aids-pdf-integration-and-development-in-document-management-systems-with-new-sdk.html

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PDFTron unveils a new version of SDK for PDF solutions

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Not just a free reader

These days, it’s fairly difficult to get excited when you hear of yet another free PDF reader. I mean seriously, how many times can you read the one PDF, right?

But whoa daddy – when it comes to Nitro Reader, you need to make sure you’re sitting down before you fire it up. It’s so jam-packed-full-of-features that just won’t cost you a cent – I can guarantee you’re going to make the switch – or at least come pretty darn close to it.

Unlike most bloggers who have given their reviews of the product,  I have been going into hand-to-hand combat with PDF for over 15 years. Making PDF products, using PDF products, pretty much anything you can think is possible to do with a PDF — I’ve done it. And after all this time, yes, after making the Nitro Reader drop and give me twenty.

It’s now my default PDF reader.

Nitro Reader is not just a Reader

Why would that be I hear you ask, or at least you should be asking? Well, it’s because the name itself is kind of misleading. You see it’s called the Nitro Reader – but, it’s actually far from Reader. It’s more a cut down version of the entire Nitro Professional product itself — we’re talking reading, writing, modifying, updating, the whole shebang.

The sort of thing that you would normally (and be happy to) pay a little something for.

And while it may have been possible to cobble together a variety of products on your computer – maybe some open source, maybe some free from other vendors to achieve a similar result. What’s the reality? Well, the software usually looks terrible and relies on your wizardry to make work together. And with respect to some of the new Nitro features, well, they just don’t exist at all.

Nitro Reader Task Bar

I don’t want to spend a whole lot of time running you through tips and how-to’s here — I’ll give you my quick appraisal here and you can go download it and see what you think yourself:

1. It’s easy to use, you don’t need a manual. It doesn’t have a bevy of tiny buttons that require a magnifying glass or microscope.

2. The features that are free, really are free. They’re not free for 14-days, or free for 5 PDF files, or for 25 pages. A quick list of the features from the taskbar:

• Add Note – Use this tool to add a sticky note to a PDF containing comments
• Highlight Text – You can highlight text on the page in all colors
• Type Text – Use this to indelibly type text directly onto the page
• Stamp Signature – The Nitro team say you can use the  ”Stamp Signature” to add your signature. Actually, this tool lets you stamp an image onto the page. It can be your signature, it can be a picture of your face, a picture of your dog, your mother-in-law, anything you want. But shhhh! Don’t tell them I told you.
• Create From File – Select a file, convert it to PDF and load into the Reader.
• Extract Text – Well, um, surprise surprise, it extracts the contents into a text file for reuse.
• Extract Images – Rips out all of the images within the file into a folder for reuse. Great for readers of “Men’s Magazine’s”.
• Reset Forms – Clears all the form field values so you can start from scratch.

3. You can actually fill in and save PDF forms. This is not possible in Adobe Reader at present. In fact, if you want to do this using Adobe’s products, you must be ready to fork out the cashola for Acrobat Standard or in some cases Adobe LiveCycle. If that’s the path you take, I hope you have deep pockets — made of fire retardant material.

Form Fields That Save

4. As I mentioned previously, we’re not dealing with just a reader here — converting to PDF is just as easy as dragging a document onto the Nitro Reader icon. PDF viewing, form filling, markup and conversion? Yes. And more.

Drag and Drop Conversion

But why?

Why have Nitro released a free PDF reader that not only competes with Adobe Reader but blows it out of the water?

It’s very simple. Nitro has another product called Nitro PDF Professional which is not free, but competes with Adobe Acrobat for professional PDF users. Nitro is betting that once you’ve tried out the 100%  free Nitro Reader then you’ll be willing to upgrade to the Professional version at a later date when you need to perform more advanced PDF tasks.

So there you have it, Nitro Reader has arrived and Adobe Reader looks rather behind-the-times in comparison.

Who knows where this will end — but one thing is for sure — the game has changed and Nitro is leading the charge.

FULL DISCLOSURE: While I am an investor in Nitro PDF (among others), this review is objective. My first experience with the Nitro Reader was part of the private beta review on May 12, 2010.

Post from: 4x PDF Blog

Nitro Reader Blasts Off

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“The original version of Quick PDF Tools was and still is freeware — it’s a simple right-click utility for doing PDF-related tasks,” said Rowan Hanna, Debenu CTO, “it’s very popular, something we’re really pleased to put our name to”.

“… But in building this version we took what was mighty, and also made it professional — something a business user could use,” quipped Hanna, “in fact, Karl De Abrew our CEO said to me, if we didn’t make this ourself he’d actually buy a copy himself.”

It will let you preview PDF files, merge and split PDF files, crop and rotate pages, extract form field data, edit JavaScript, convert PDF to text and much more.

The professional version is available for $59 USD from the official Quick PDF Tools website – http://www.quickpdftools.com/

Disclosure: 4xPDF.com is run by Debenu.com the makers of Quick PDF Tools

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A mighty professional box of PDF tools

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Simple and quick to use, Quick PDF Tools lets you preview PDF files, merge PDF files, edit document properties, add and edit custom metadata, convert images to PDF, convert PDF to text and much more.

“Last year, we designed and released Quick PDF Tools – our simple right-click utility that allowed you to do a lot of basic PDF-related tasks for free,” said Rowan Hanna, Debenu CTO, “And here’s the deal – people loved it, we got thousands of people installing it each week.

“When we originally put Quick PDF Tools together, I said to Debenu CEO, Karl De Abrew, let’s make this mighty, .. and he agreed,” laughed Hanna, “.. but this time, De Abrew said to me, ‘Rowan, I want you to make this one mightier!’ And so that’s what we did. I hope you love it using it as much as we enjoyed making it.”

It is available in free and professional editions.  A easy-to-use yet sophisticated mini-application that’s powered by Debenu’s Quick PDF Library (www.quickpdflibrary.com).

Disclosure: 4xPDF.com is run by Debenu.com the makers of Quick PDF Tools

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An even mightier box of free PDF tools

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The PDF specification provides many options for the display of textual content and the related extraction of the text content. In this article I will try to highlight the key areas and terms that you will encounter when working under the hood with fonts in PDF files. Key terms that you should take note of are in bold.

PDF text definitions

Each block of text in a PDF document consists of four sets of data.

1. The encoded characters which are sequences of bytes that represent the individual character codes that make up the text
2. The font data which is a group of glyphs (character visualisations) accessed by a unique number called a Glyph ID
3. A map that links the encoded character codes to Glyph IDs
4. A map that links the character codes to Unicode values. This map is not needed when displaying the PDF but is required to allow the user to extract text content from the document (for example when selecting text and copying it to the clipboard to be pasted into another application).

Multiple blocks of encoded characters can be linked to the same maps and font data.

Font data

The font data can be stored in a number of possible formats:

1. Adobe Type 1 Font Format, known as a Type 1 font
2. Adobe Compact Font Format, known as a CFF font
3. A standard TrueType font
4. An OpenType font which has a similar structure to a TrueType font but allows the glyph outline descriptions to be either TrueType or CFF format.
5. A Type 3 font which uses PDF drawing commands to define the glyph outlines. This font format allows greater flexibility over the appearance of the glyphs but does not include a hinting mechanism resulting in reduced visual quality for small text or low resolutions.

Font embedding

Font data can be embedded into the PDF. This allows the PDF to be viewed in exactly the same way on any computer. If the font data is not embedded the PDF viewer it is simply specified by name.

Non-embedded fonts force the PDF viewer application to look on the user’s computer for a similar font. This may result in differences in the display of the text when viewed on different computers with different installed fonts.

Embedded font data can consist of a complete font file or it can be a font subset which contains only the font data for a smaller number of glyphs. For example, if a PDF consists mainly of English text with a small piece of Japanese text, the font for the Japanese text could be subsetted to only include the glyphs actually used discarding the font data for the unused glyphs. This dramatically reduces the size of the embedded font data resulting in a smaller file size for the PDF.

Encoding formats

Fonts can specify either simple or composite encoding.

Simple encoding uses 8-bit character codes mapped to a character set. This means that a maximum of 255 characters can be displayed from the font.

Predefined character sets can be used directly or adjusted using a differences array. The predefined character set encodings are:

1. StandardEncoding is the default character set used for Latin-text Type 1 font programs. This is a direct mapping to the order of the glyphs in the font.
2. MacRomanEncoding is the standard 8-bit character set used in Western versions of the Apple Mac OS operating system. Type 1 and TrueType fonts usually contain an internal cmap table to map character codes to Glyph IDs.
3. WinAnsiEncoding is the standard Windows-1252 character set used in Western versions of the Microsoft Windows operating system. Type 1 and TrueType fonts usually contain an internal cmap table to map character codes to Glyph IDs.

The alternative is composite encoding which uses a two step process to encode characters:

1. In the first step, the defined encoding format is used to translate a character code to a character identifier or CID. The CID value is used to look up font metrics for the character (such as the vertical and horizontal width of the character).
2. The second step uses a setting from the font definition to translate the CID to a Glyph ID allowing the character to be displayed using the glyph description in the font data.

Composite encoding allows characters to be encoded using multiple bytes. Fixed‑length encoding uses the same number of bytes for each character while variable‑length encoding can use varying byte lengths for different character codes.

For example, UCS‑2 is a fixed‑length encoding that always uses two bytes for each character with the character codes representing characters in the Unicode character set.

UTF‑16 is another encoding for the Unicode character set. It is a variable‑length encoding that uses two bytes for most common characters and four bytes for others.

The variable-length UTF-8 encoding uses from one to four bytes to encode the Unicode character set. Single-byte character codes are used for most English text, two or three bytes for common characters in other languages and four bytes for rarely used characters.

Shift JIS uses one or two bytes to encode Japanese characters corresponding to Code Page 932 used in the Japanese version of Microsoft Windows.

Identity‑H is a simple fixed-length mapping that uses 16-bit character codes. Each two-byte character code maps directly to a CID value.

For composite encoding a structure called a CMap is used to define the encoding format and the character set of the encoded character codes. A special type of CMap called a ToUnicode CMap is used to translate from CID values to Unicode character codes.

When composite encoding is used with either TrueType fonts or OpenType fonts containing TrueType glyph outlines a CIDToGIDMap structure is used to translate CIDs to Glyph IDs.

When composite encoding is used with either CFF fonts or OpenType fonts containing CFF glyph outlines the font data is used to translate CIDs to Glyph IDs.

PDF Standard Fonts

The PDF specification provides a list of fonts known as the standard 14 fonts. These fonts are guaranteed to be available in all PDF viewer applications that conform to the PDF specification so text using these standard fonts do not require embedded font data.

Adobe Font Packs

Adobe Acrobat and Adobe Reader have a feature that automatically downloads and installs a Font Pack when a PDF document is opened containing non-embedded fonts with font names that match the fonts in the Font Pack.

For example, the font named HeiseiKakuGo-W5 is part of the Asian Font Pack. A PDF document could contain a non-embedded font with this font name. If Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader opens such a PDF document and the font isn’t available on the system it will offer to automatically download the Asian Font Pack and successfully display the content of the PDF.

Predefined CMaps

The PDF specification provides a list of predefined CMaps. A PDF document may contain text that has been encoded using any of these predefined CMaps without embedding the CMap into the file. This reduces the file size of the PDF and allows text to be extracted easily.

Post from: 4x PDF Blog

Technical background to PDF font options

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A brief list of the new features and innovations included in version 6 are:

• XPS document format support with the ability to export PDFs into XPS document and vice-versa
• PDF Creation directly from within MS Outlook to convert emails, calendar entries and attachments into PDFs
• Fully compatible with Windows 7 and MS Office 2010 – supports 32 and 62-bit environments
• Ability to create interactive PDFs by implementing events and corresponding actions in the PDF documents. The actions can also be performed in the PDF Viewer of Perfect PDF Premium 6. The previous software only supported actions in Adobe Acrobat
• Supports XFDF and FDF in PDF Forms
• New features for forms editing such as special highlights on form fields and display the name of fields in edit mode
• Ability to add links to external and embedded files
• Ability to manage multiple changes and revisions to PDFs
• Ability to add and replace text
• Enhanced search and find features to locate text patterns. The search facility displays the results in a more user friendly manner
• Powerful editor for backgrounds, watermarks, stamps, headers and footers
• Ability to import content directly from TWAIN comaptible hardware such as scanners and webcams
• Installation in two languages – English and German

Perfect PDF Premium 6 runs on Windows 7 / Vista / XP and supports integration with MS Office 2010 / 2007 / 2003.

Perfect PDF Premium 6 is priced at EUR 79.99 while the upgrade from version 6 to 7 is priced at EUR 39.99. soft Xpansion is also offering a 25% discount for new customers until 10th April 2010. The software is available via soft Xpansion’s webshop at http://www.eknow-how.de/shop-en/pprod/sp01900e.php

The press release can be read at http://www.pr-inside.com/soft-xpansion-s-perfect-pdf-premium-r1798829.htm

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Enhanced Perfect PDF Premium 6 for creating and editing PDFs

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