PDF files are becoming an important component in our document download and storage universe. But there are problems. For example,
Adobe Acrobat is slow at opening PDF files. This software is also not very easy to use when filling out forms.
There are additional capabilities needed to organize libraries of PDF documents. For example, we need to be able to turn out lists of documents stored in our PDF libraries.
The following notes document a few recent discoveries.
Foxit Pro ($35) is a very fast PDF reader. You can use it as stand-alone and to support reading downloaded PDF files. There is a "typewriter" option that lets you enter text on a PDF document without having to create a form field; this is handy if you are filling out a one-time form that didn't come with PDF form fields. The annotation features available in
Adobe Acrobat are in
Foxit Pro, so you won't be missing those.
Adobe Acrobat Pro does have the advantage of doing OCR on PDF documents. While we have not been considering doing OCR on everything, it might be time to reconsider this possibility.
Foxit Pro comes with a program,
Foxit Library, that will index all of the text in all of your PDF library documents. You can look down the list of words, click on one, and find the documents and frequency of occurrence of the selected word.
A-PDF Info Changer is a free program that lets you read and update the basic header fields in a PDF file. This could be useful for entering document identification information. The field names don't correspond very closely to bibliographic citations. That is a problem that needs to be faced.
