Blog of a Long Distance Worker Tech

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Tag Archives: PDF

Kindle – Weight Loss Reading

I have written here about the extra curricular uses of the Kindle 3G, but after a number of weeks using it I have become very enamoured of its ability to swallow documents and manuals in PDF form. Of course, I could always have (and do have) them with me on my laptop and even iPad but nothing beats having them in a device that can be held in one hand, and has a hi res screen good enough to show a whole A4 page with good comfort. With the amount of reading material with me today as I type this in my hotel room, it would have to be hundreds of kilogrammes of paper all at my fingertips.

You can send the PDFs to the Kindle for conversion via email but I don’t find that the best way (particularly with the roulette wheel of picking it up by 3G or WiFi, when you are charged for the 3G transmission). Strangely enough the best way to me is side loading the books to the device via the micro-USB cable, as this does not do any strange conversion attempts.

PDFs on the Kindle offer almost all of the capabilities of normal books – the tracking of read position being the key one, particularly with texts that are hundreds of pages long. The only downside I can see at the moment is the lack of flexibility of filing of the books and the inability to see status at a glance of the cover (the ‘new’ book status soon disappears when you open it).

This device is a real boon to the traveller.

Document Workflow

We all have to deal with paper. Not everything comes into the email inbox, so we work out workflows of how to deal with all that paper… moving from envelope tray to inbox, to work-in-progress, to completed and for file. However there is the new way of dealing with this that many larger/medium size companies have been using for several years using relatively expensive hardware/software combinations for scanning on entry and then using expensive groupware/workflow software to move around to required processor. Now however this can be done cheaply and on a budget with the right process.HP5610ScannerPrinter

How complex you make it depends on scale, as the single person operation can get away with a looser workflow than the 20+ person operation. The most important piece is getting the paperwork scanned into the machine and this can now be done using a simple all-in-one printer/scanner or standalone scanner available for less than £50. HP (and I am sure many others) offer the F4272 Printer/Scanner/Copier which comes with their own Solution Center software which can be simply configured to scan multi-page documents into PDF/Searchable PDF files, for less than £40. This is a quick and effective solution for the very small office, or you can go up a gear and obtain a device with an autosheet feeder such as the HP Officejet 5610 Printer/Scanner/Copier/Fax for £54. Once you have the document in PDF form, then the whole document handling and filing process becomes oh so much simpler.

After the hardware/software solution, all that is really required is the central document storage location and/or email distribution tied to a simple filing system (how about Year Folder/Month Folder) and a fixed file naming convention (such as YYYY-MM-DD Subject Matter.pdf).

I have found this a very effective method of dealing with incoming paperwork for many years, although I have not had the benefit of the low cost of entry that today we have. So what is the mobile aspect of this? Having access to all of your company documents online in PDF form from wherever you happen to be, and with the use of the modern USB powered Scanner such as those from Canon, you can make use of the same ingest process ending up with PDF files of all your documents wherever you are, as those scanners are really small and light.

PDFs’ R You

Adobe are responsible for an important publishing format with the PDF, unfortunately they have made it prohibitively expensive to create documents through the use of Adobe Acrobat. This is not to be confused with Acrobat Reader, the freely available tool that Adobe distribute. Now their tool allows you to explore the more esoteric aspects of PDF creation, but for most people you just want to be able to save into the format, for basic publication/distribution. For this, an excellent tool is the freeware doPDF from Softland which operates as a virtual printer driver allowing its use from any software that can print.doPDF