If you have ever downloaded free eBooks, product manuals, consumer guides, etc. from the web, learn about PDF files. These files owe much of their popularity to the fact that they can be read on any computer with Adobe’s free reader. Also, most word processing programs have the ability to convert a document to PDF format with a mouse click. PDF is an acronym for Portable Document Format, a format created by Adobe Systems for document exchange. I was a passive user until I bought a copy of Sid Steward’s “PDF Hacks”. This book really opened my eyes to the many features of this tool.

The first one that interested me was PDFtk, or PDF Tool Kit. This is a set of command line tools available for both Windows and Linux. With PDFtk, the user can select specific pages of a document, rearrange them, combine them with other books, and basically create custom reference documents. As an example, I have the usual collection of eBooks on article writing. By combining my favorite pages from each, I had a useful reference source. I even added my own notes to various sections to tie the material together and document the tips and how-tos I’d discovered.

For some time I have been using the free open source program Inkscape to create vector graphics. Inkscape has many of the same features as Adobe Illustrator. Sid shows how to use pstoedit to create vector files and embed them in a document.

There is a section on how to add web-style navigation to your PDF document. Buttons can be used to link to online material. It’s easy to style these buttons to get away from the usual gray, institutional-looking buttons.

Hack #66 shows how to copy protect the PDF document you have created. This is very important because of the ease with which documents are transmitted over the web. It is very frustrating to spend a lot of time and research developing a commercial product that has real value to the reader only to find out that others are distributing it as a free document.

I knew that Visual Basic could be used to access and manipulate PDF files. What I didn’t know but learned in Hack #95 was that you could do the same thing with perl. Perl is free, well-documented, and has a large support community. There are many perl modules available to simplify the code of any project.

PDF Hacks is a great book. Get a copy and start creating your own books.