There’s less and less reason to fork over the expensive license fee for a full version of Adobe Acrobat these days. The web is littered with free, lightweight options that will allow you to do pretty much anything you’d want to do with Acrobat. Web app PDFVue is a relative newcomer to the field, and it brings a lot of useful PDF editing features to the table for the budget-conscious web worker.

Right away I was attracted to PDFVue because of its Firefox integration. Currently, the feature is still in testing, so you’ll have to have a free Mozilla.org account to use it. You can then download the Firefox PDFVue plugin, which opens PDF links in a new tab in PDFVue, instead of trying to launch Acrobat or Preview, both of which cause headaches and hang-ups on my MacBook from time to time.

PDFVue offers editing and annotation of files directly in your browser. You have text selection and annotation tools, and a variety of viewing options. You can automatically zoom the document to fit the page, although PDFVue is missing a fullscreen reading view, which would be greatly appreciated.

It may not have all the nice-to-haves of a fully-featured app like Acrobat, but it does all the necessary bits, like commenting. You can tweak your comments as desired, including changing the font and text color and size, comment box color and border, and whether or not the comment will show up on a printed copy of the document. You can also add links wherever you want, and attach sticky notes. Any markup you add shows up in the summary in the right-hand menu so that you, or anyone else, can quickly jump to it.

You can also create and edit forms using PDFVue. Clicking the “Forms” tab will give you access to checkboxes, text fields, radio buttons, drop-down menus, and submit buttons. It’s not as full-featured as Adobe Acrobat Pro’s own form creation tool, but it’s enough to get the job done if you just want to throw together something simple quickly.

Of course, you can save and download any PDF file made or edited in PDFVue, and share it with others via an automatically generated unique URL. All in all, it’s a handy little tool, and a nice, lightweight alternative to desktop-based options. Check it out if, like most web workers, you find yourself running into a lot of PDFs in the course of your daily web work.

What do you use for working with PDFs?

Nearly everyone working on the web uses PDF files from time to time. If you use Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Reader to view those PDF files, be warned that Adobe yesterday issued a security bulletin about a critical vulnerability affecting its software.

A buffer overflow exploit has been discovered that could render your computer vulnerable to attack; a malicious party could potentially use the exploit to take control of your machine. All versions of Acrobat and Reader from 7 onwards on all platforms are vulnerable to attack.  Patches to these products will not be available until March 11th. Until Adobe issue an update, it may be advisable to switch to an alternative PDF reader (Foxit works well for Windows), and, as always, it would be a good idea to make sure that your antivirus software is up-to-date and exercise extreme caution when opening files from untrusted sources.

(via DownloadSquad)

In today’s world, we’re all looking for ways to have less of an impact on the environment. One of the main devices that consumes resources is our printers. Between toner/ink and paper, these necessary evils of modern business eat up our pocket book as well as costing us trees in the process.

These tips from PC magazine serve as a good reminder of how to be more judicious with our printing. The suggestions include using your Print Preview more thoroughly, printing to PDF for digital storage and searchability, and really considering whether or not a print job is truly necessary.

Do you have any additional tips? Do you consider yours a paperless office?

(photo credit: Flickr user josef.stuefer)

It’s time once again to welcome the week with a handy tip to save a few precious minutes. Today we’ll be checking out a handy way to print and share your Google Calendar.

Printing your GCal

Chances are if you are a user of Google Calendar, at some point in time you’ve wanted to share your calendar with someone. Whether it be your husband/wife who wants to know what your week looks like, or a business colleague who you want to schedule a meeting with, easily sharing calendars can be a bit tricky. Sure you can always share your calendar with them via their Google Calendar or iCal, but what about the times you just want to easily give a snapshot of your day/week’s schedule?

Tech-Recipies.com shows us how to do this. First, click on the Print link at the top of your Google Calendar. Then, in the printing preferences, use the dropdowns to adjust the Font Size and Orientation. Check the Black and White checkbox. Now that you are done, click the “Save As…” button to easily download your newly created PDF calendar.

What better way to start your week than by getting a few good tips on how to save some time as your workweek becomes reality?

Easing PDF troubles with PDFMeNot

Even though PDF is a fantastic format for sharing documents, (as discussed in the last Monday Time Saver post) viewing them in a browser can be annoying.  Typically, you either have to download and open them in Adobe Acrobat or view them in the browser (which can cause your browser to crash).  When it comes right down to it, opening a PDF can be cumbersome task.

With the web application called PDFMeNot, you by bypass the need to open a separate reader application by opening the PDF directly inside your browser.  This handy application called “A nicer way of linking to your PDFs” and instantly makes the PDF viewable in side a viewable in-browser display.

Tracking your online time with 8aweek

The web can be a very distracting place.  Getting caught up in ‘web surfing’ can drastically hinder our ability to get work done.  8aweek is a Firefox plug-in that helps you account for your time on the web.  You can easily use 8aweek to add some hard numbers to how long you spend on specific web sites that may not be additive to your professional career.

8aweek lumps sites together, so if you spend time on CNet’s News.com (looking at work news items) and CNet.com (looking for a new digital toy), all your time will be reported as visiting CNet.com.  Additionally, time spend in Google Reader will be lumped in with time searching at Google.com.  With 8aweek, you can restrict the time you spend on different sites, depending on your personal preferences.

Move your email around between Gmail accounts

Lifehacker recently posted tips regarding moving your email between Gmail accounts.  Why would you want to do this?  Have you ever opened a second Gmail account, perhaps one for business and one for personal?  How would you easily move a large quantity of messages been the two accounts?  Using Lifehacker’s techniques, this becomes easy.

The method for doing this begins by enabling POP access on your first Gmail account (the mailbox your copying items out of).  Then, log out of the first Gmail account and log in to your second Gmail account (the one your copying items into).  Within the second account, click on Settings, then Accounts.  In the Get mail from other accounts section, click “Add another mail account”.  Enter in your settings, following the screenshot below as an example.

Your old messages will be imported in automatically by Gmail.  You may want to go back and turn on forwarding to your new account and disabling POP access, whichever is best for your situation.