GitHub – themsaid/ibis: A PHP tool that helps you write eBooks in markdown and convert to PDF. https://github.com/themsaid/ibis
vgel.me – Getting a full PDF from a DRM-encumbered online textbook
vgel.me – Getting a full PDF from a DRM-encumbered online textbook – http://vgel.me/posts/cracking-online-textbook/
Upload – PDFy – Instant PDF Host
Why does PDFy exist? I got sick of documents getting locked up behind login walls of services like Scribd. PDFy exists to offer a place where anybody can instantly upload and share a PDF, much like Imgur does for images. PDFy is free, ad-free, and non-commercial.
via Upload – PDFy – Instant PDF Host.
If you’re interested in running your own the code is on Github at https://github.com/joepie91/pdfy.
How the US CCA generate PDFs
A real quick look at PDFs from the Circuit Courts reveals how the PDFs they release are generated.
- 1st – Corel WordPerfect
- 2nd – Microsoft Word
- 3rd – Microsoft Word
- 4th – Microsoft Word
- 5th – Corel WordPerfect
- 6th – ? not obvious from PDF meta data
- 7th – Microsoft Word
- 8th – Corel WordPerfect
- 9th – Corel WordPerfect
- 10th – Microsoft Word
- 11th – Microsoft Word
- DC – Adobe
- Fed – Adobe
Information was obtained by simply downloading a recent PDF and looking at the properties of the file for creation information.
Please Make PDFs Go Away…
Most law firms have a history of using Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) to distribute their brochures, papers and longer written pieces. That practice matches what web usability experts have long advised: “PDF is great for distributing documents that need to be printed,” but not much more than that. The well-traveled rule is that if a document contains more than five pages of text (hint: that excludes lawyer profiles), then PDF format is worth considering.
Now, let’s throw a wrench into this. As we approach the end of 2011, many firms and their their clients are moving toward paperless offices. Clients are consuming law firm publications on a variety of devices, including smartphones, tablets, e-readers, and large multiple-monitor desktop environments. So how likely is it that we consume a PDF on printed paper? Not very.
Slaw – Revisiting PDFs for Law Firm Websites & Mobile Publishing
Finally someone has something useful to say about the future of PDFs. As someone who has to deal with found PDFs from all over the web, I can honestly say I wouldn’t miss them if they disappeared tomorrow. PDF is an excellent way to capture the artifact of the document page, but a PDF is not a web page, and PDF is not open data. PDF is a photocopy, a snapshot picture of a document. If you are interested in doing things like indexing data, repurposing data, reusing data, then a PDF is pretty useless.