PDF rant

February 12th, 2007 |

Blogs are for ranting, right? Right then. I HATE PDFs. I know a lot of people who love them, but I do not understand it. And everybody uses them. All the scholarly journals use them. If you want an electronic copy of a journal paper, it’s almost certainly going to be a PDF, and I hate them, and I’ve now frustrated myself for about three hours just trying to DO WHAT I NEED TO DO with it.

Some PDFs are all right. I’ve never created one (cf. the fact that I HATE them), so I don’t know whether the differences are in the way they’re created, or what. All I need to do is freakin’ highlight something. That’s it. So I know upon rereading that that was a part I want to reference or quote or whatever. Some PDFs let me do this. Others don’t. Is this some sort of stupid rights management thing, because the document’s creator thought it would somehow impinge upon their rights if I HIGHLIGHTED SOMETHING? Honestly. Note that I can’t do this at all in Adobe Reader, because even though the help says I should be able to turn on the commenting bar and highlight and make notes, I cannot. It is not there. I’m using Foxit Reader now, which does let me annotate some PDFs (though without paying $40 for the premium edition I can’t get rid of the little evaluation stamp they put on the document, but that doesn’t matter to me). Except the document I just opened? Can’t select text, can’t do ANYTHING. And the weirdest thing is, it looks like the rights management settings are the same on both the document I can edit and the one I can’t. So I had a whole ‘nother paragraph blaming DRM, but maybe that’s not it. Now I’m thoroughly confused.

The only thing I can guess, looking at the two documents, is that one was created from a text file, the other from a scan or photo file. Is that possible? If that’s the case, I guess I might have to be a little less mad. But it just turns my question into: how can I take a PDF and run it through an OCR or something so that I can actually work with it as text, when I didn’t create the PDF? I can’t believe that there’s not some way to make PDFs like this USEFUL short of e-mailing the journal and asking them to reconvert everything using a text format as the basis. Any ideas? Anyone who uses PDFs regularly?

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Posted in tech

  • Dad
    I got a PDF at work of some forms that I wanted to not have to rekey, but could not get them out of the PDF. A guy in the next cube had REAL Acrobat, and he was able to open the document and save it as a Word doc, so I could copy and edit it. Saved hours. I think you need the REAL Acrobat. Bobber's idea of the student discount rings nice as well. Pastor J also has a bunch of experience with PDF's and I would guess that he doesn't want to print them off either.....
  • You know I am not really an expert on PDFs. Looking at the Acrobat 8 page, it says, "Use familiar commenting tools including a highlighter, sticky notes, pencil, strikethrough, and more. Also attach files from other applications inline as comments." Which sounds like what you need. Again, I suggest you go to your computer store (is there something on campus) and see if there is a student discount. There is a free trial download, I don't know if all the features will work with this but give it a shot and see.
  • See, that's the thing. I don't want to change the document. I want to annotate it. Which doesn't involve changing it, just adding an overlay of my own marks and notes. I know you're not a Microsoft person, but I've used Microsoft Reader for ebooks a bit, and you can highlight, add notes, bookmarks, all sorts of things, and they're saved in a separate folder, but associated with the document you're annotating (so you see them when you look at the ebook, but they aren't actually a part of it). This is so much better than the pure static PDF that you can't do anything but read, and I don't understand why PDFs, since they're so standard and ubiquitous, don't have this sort of functionality.

    Thanks for the point about photocopies and OCR. I guess it probably goes on a journal-by-journal basis whether they use text-based or photo-based PDFs. And I have a feeling my school wouldn't understand why I don't just print things out like everyone else here does.
  • Yes, it does have to do with rights management. Since it is much harder to change the document, it is less of a worry that someone will plagiarize or outright steel it.

    And you are correct that some PDF's are actually pages that have been photocopied. OCR would be possible but might have restrictions and also might require more proof reading since OCR is not always foolproof. Thus is would be a bit more expensive to create it I suppose.

    You might want to see if you can get a copy of Acrobat Writer at a student rate. Although I think that some documents are locked up so that even this will have only limited capabilities. You should go to a computer store or maybe your schools CS department and see if you can get definitive answers for these things. Good luck!
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