Investintech Tips Archives - Page 15 of 17 - PDF Blog

How To Create A Printable Valentine’s Day PDF Coupon Booklet With Sonic

It’s always tough coming up with the perfect gift for our loved ones, especially around Valentine’s Day when generic chocolate boxes and teddy bears take the spotlight. Have you found that ideal gift yet?

If not and you’re thinking of gifting something creative and genuine this year, a Valentine’s Day coupon booklet might just be the thing you’re looking for.

The idea behind this concept is to customize each coupon with actions and treats that others can “cash in” on. The more you know the person, the more meaningful your coupon gift can be. So if your significant other hates a certain chore, you can create a coupon offering to do it for them. It’s a great (free) way to give a personal gift that keeps on giving!

Valentine printable gift

Getting them into a PDF booklet is just a handy way of getting them in a format you can save and instantly print up and give out. But you may find it difficult to get the formatting just right for a printable book. An easy way to do this is by using the Create Booklet feature in Sonic.

It can create and format a booklet from regular PDF files intended for professional print and assembly, like brochures and pamphlets. And we can certainly use the feature for basic DIY booklet projects like this one.

Creating A Simple Printable PDF Booklet

You’ll first need to generate your coupons, which calls for a bit of careful thinking. To help here are a few ideas to get you going:

Offer coupons for your kids to stay up for one hour or to get some extra dessert
Spouses who are always fixing things around the house can offer to handle the next household disaster
Boyfriends can include coupons to sit in on a chick flick with their girlfriends
For friends, how about a coupon to buy the next round of drinks?

After you have your ideas, you can create your own coupons from scratch in Microsoft Office Word with text boxes and a bit of formatting. We used a Word template because of its simplicity. We customized the text, added some fine print, and saved it to our computer.

Valentine Coupon Template

Our template only offered 2 coupons per page, so we used 8 of them, customized each, and batch converted them. We then merged all the PDFs to get a single 8 page PDF with 16 coupons for this tutorial.

When you have your own file ready to go:

1) In Sonic, use the Create PDF From File command to browse, select and convert your MS Word to PDF.

2) Click on the Create Booklet option

Create PDF Booklet Sonic

3) Select your options.

i) For a basic booklet, select Landscape mode and LETTER sized paper.

Sonic Create Booklet options

ii) Under Scale, select Auto. Ensure Proportionally is selected.

iii) Leave the Margins default settings to leave room for any personalizations you’ll want to add in after it’s printed.

iv) For Binding Type, select Book. Set the Sheets per Fold setting at 4. This works for an 8 page PDF with 2 coupons per page. It combines 2 pages onto one, allowing you to bind the pages at the centre. When folded, you get single-sided coupons which are perfect for cutting out.

Valentine Sonic booklet layout

v) Crop Marks and Bleed Allowance can be left to their default values.

4) Add any other elements that are appropriate:

Add a secure PDF password to keep the PDF coupons secure and prevent any other print outs.
If there’s no set expiration date, add a watermark down the length of each page first to keep track of them.
Go back and add a cover page to the booklet. Insert a blank page you can stamp an image on or add a page from another PDF.

5) Save the PDF booklet to your computer, print it out, and bind the pages.

Here’s what ours looked like, fresh off the printer with the above settings and an added cover page. As you can see, you’ll have a lot of freedom to jazz it up in your own style:

Printed Valentine PDF Booklet

If you haven’t used the feature yet, now is a good time to get acquainted with it. So go ahead and start in on your own booklet. No doubt, you’ll have a lot of original and thoughtful coupons to generate.

Main Photo Credit: Patricia Mellin via photopin cc

4 Ways Investintech Can Help You Keep Your New Year’s Resolution

Happy New Year 2014

New Year’s resolutions are perhaps the hardest promises to keep. It’s not uncommon to give up half way through the year on them whether it’s due to lack of energy, determination or support. For whatever reason, it happens to the best of us.

With that in mind, we thought the first post of the year should be one to get you started on the right track with your 2014 resolution. Though we can’t always be there to give you a small push of encouragement whenever you fall astray, we can offer a few ideas on how you can use our tools to help with some of the most common New Year’s resolutions being made.

Resolution: To Live A Healthier Lifestyle

It’s always proven that the best way to achieve a goal is to track your progress and keep milestones in view. If you look for tracking sheets online to help you stay on top of your fitness and health goals, you’ll find that most of these are in the PDF format.

Use Able2Extract Pro to convert those PDF to Word documents or Excel spreadsheets. After all, in order to track your daily progress, you’ll need to work consistently with those sheets.

Resolution: To Learn Something New

When it comes to learning something new, it’s always helpful to generate yourself a good reference or master file you can always turn to. You can create such a resource on any topic you’re learning about using Sonic PDF Creator.

Merging PDFs With Sonic

For instance, one resolution I made this year was to actively keep up with learning to play the violin, which includes developing dexterity in my fingers with scales and arpeggios. Fortunately, I found PDF music sheets of them in every key. Once I downloaded them, I used Sonic to merge PDF files into a single file with other violin sheet music and resources. I then added bookmarks to keep it organized for easy access.

Resolution: To Be More Environmentally Aware

Going green doesn’t have to be too hard to keep up. Given that cloud drives, scanners and apps are now pretty much the norm, the way you work needs to adapt anyway. This also applies to anything you’re keeping digital—photo albums, tax records, resumes, essays, research. The list goes on.

Able2Extract Professional can help you start keeping things digital. Once you can scan in your documents, you never have to print them out again. Able2Extract Professional will give you access to the scanned PDF content instantly, allowing you to reuse the information you need within other applications.

Resolution: To Practice Better Security Habits

This resolution can cover a wide range of more specific resolutions like regularly changing up your passwords to tightening up your Facebook privacy settings. Sonic PDF Creator offers features that can help get you into security mode with your digital assets, starting with your PDF files.

Securing PDFs With Sonic

With Sonic, you can create a password protected file you can customize with permissions and access. You can also add encryption, watermarks and stamps to brand the content, preventing it from being copied.

Anyone would agree that creating a resolution is one thing, but realistically and methodically keeping it up is another. So instead of focusing on creating a resolution, focus on ways you can keep the resolution itself with everyday tools you already have. All it takes is a bit of creativity.

Trim Down Large PDF Files With These 5 Simple Tips

Trim Down Large PDF Files

One of the biggest pet peeves of dealing with a PDF file is the large file size. There’s nothing worse than an email stuck in your outbox because of a large PDF attachment—unless, of course, it’s a slow PDF download from the web.

How can you slim down the size of your PDF document? While this heavily depends from PDF to PDF and the type of content it contains, there are a few general PDF creation options in particular which you should pay close attention to. Some fine-tuning here and there will go a long way to shave the megabytes off of your file.

Use The “Save As” Command

This is a good place to start to cutting down the bloat. Every time you hit Save in an application, you end up with a usually bigger file size. This is because the function saves the changes and appends them to the file. The same goes for PDF files.

Saving PDF files

Instead, use the “Save As” command. By doing this, you overwrite the entire file, eliminating unused objects and accumulated changes. The result is a smaller PDF file you can manage. So go for the “Save As” option once you’ve added everything you need to your PDF.

Compress And Downsample PDF Images

Given the visual nature of digital content today, images are a big part of PDF files. However, if your PDF isn’t intended for high resolution needs, you can keep your file under control by downsampling and compressing your images. When you downsample bitmap images you basically decrease the amount of pixels in it which reduces the overall resolution and hence, the size of the PDF.

Compressing PDF Images

Downsampling options will tell your PDF program know how you want to delete those pixels. You’ll be able to choose mainly between bicubic, subsample, and average downsampling methods. Each has its own advantages, so choose wisely. As well, you can usually set the desired resolutions and decide if you want to compress your images using popular compression algorithms such as ZIP, LZW, or JPEG.

Choose The Right Colour Space

You may have heard of RGB and CMYK colour spaces before. Each one has different methods of handling colour. In general, CMYK is ideal for print purposes, while RGB caters to on screen viewing.

If your PDF is mainly going to be viewed on the web or on a computer screen, choose the RGB colour space for your PDF images. In some PDF creators, you can choose to convert CMYK images to RGB if needed. It requires less data than CMYK. And one less data channel means a smaller file size.

Subset Your Fonts

By embedding fonts, you are essentially attaching the entire character set within the PDF, which can puff up the file significantly. Try to subset the fonts instead. It will keep the PDF size to a minimum.

Embedding PDF Fonts Options

When you subset a font, you attach only the font characters that are used in the PDF. If a special character like “#” isn’t used in the file, the character won’t be included. In most cases, you can choose to automatically subset fonts if the character usage is less than a certain amount. Take advantage of this feature if you have it. Your PDF fonts are just as equally important as your images.

Remove Unnecessary Frills

Depending on who and what your PDF content is intended for, you can scale down the bloat considerably. Applications that create PDFs for specific needs, like Adobe’s Photoshop for instance, will allow you to save PDFs with advance settings such as Preserve Photoshop Editing Capabilities.

But if your PDFs won’t be exclusively opened in Photoshop for editing, then there’s no need to prep the file for it. Thus, before you save a PDF with all the bells and whistles, get a good idea of how your PDF will be used and you can easily reduce the size accordingly.

PDFs are supposed to be high in quality, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that it has to be reflected in the file size. You can get a manageable PDF file with just a few adjustment s. And as an added bonus, you can accomplish most of these tweaks with Sonic PDF Creator. Just go to View>Options for Creation…. and you can access them through the dialog.

Exploring PDF Conversion On the Enterprise Level: Absolute PDF Server 3.0

Absolute PDF Server

We talk a lot about productivity and PDF conversion on the desktop, mobile, and cloud platforms. However, we never really covered the server platform where PDF conversion and productivity can occur at an even higher, much larger scale: the enterprise level.

At that level, the key point for companies is to manage resources, data and processes across the entire organization. Because it can be expensive and inefficient to have individual PDF applications for each employee, organizations typically turn to enterprise software as a solution.

What is Enterprise Software?

Enterprise software is different from what you’d normally experience from a program you buy, download, and use on your own personal computer. Enterprise software solutions are capable of catering to a large amount of users over a network, and are usually handled on the company’s backend servers.

Unlimited Users and Conversions Enterprise software applications usually handle business- or data- oriented tasks, such as info management, billing and accounting, order processing, and database management. Enterprise software is developed and offered by companies like Oracle, Sage, Microsoft, and IBM.

Moreover, enterprise workflows can differ and range from businesses and governments to schools and financial institutions. Naturally, each sector and organization has different needs. Thus, managers have to ensure that the enterprise software they choose works for their employees, the company’s IT system, and existing workflows.

Exploring An Organization’s Needs

In most cases, organizations can customize their enterprise software solutions “a la carte” according to their software strategy. Oftentimes, companies choose to use enterprise level software for tasks performed on a regular basis by the majority of its employees. Organization-wide solutions can offer workflows that are extremely effective at speeding up and controlling the task at hand.

PDF Document Conversion For The Enterprise: Absolute PDF Server 3.0

With PDF conversion, for instance, your IT managers can effectively automate a high volume of file conversions in one standardized framework. All they need is Absolute PDF Server.

Absolute PDF Server is the first enterprise-level document management solution to offer both PDF extraction and creation. It gives organizations the ability to perform both functionalities in one streamlined process.

Absolute PDF Server integrates technology from our Able2Extract PDF Server (used to convert PDF files into several other formats) and Sonic PDF Server (used to convert different file formats into PDF file format). As a result, you get quick PDF conversion to multiple formats and a tailored PDF creation process in one single location.

How Absolute PDF Server Works

How the process works depends on how your administrator sets it up. Essentially, you will either be able to email their document to a specified email address for conversion, or you can simply place your file into a watched folder (organized based on input format) which is monitored by Absolute PDF Server. In both cases, Absolute PDF Server will convert the files emailed or found within the folder, and the converted files will be sent back to you.

Converting via Absolute PDF Server Interface

You get your file properly converted while your IT administrators get full control over the process. They can manage, configure, and process the conversion queue from one user interface, ensuring that the conversion jobs are completed.

What Does Absolute PDF Server Have To Offer?

Although Absolute PDF Server is geared towards high volume conversion jobs for an entire company, it can still cater to individual conversion needs with the following features:

Convert and Create PDFs: Convert all native and scanned PDFs into MS Word, MS Excel and more; Create PDF from any printable Windows application
Customize PDF Creation: Brand your PDFs with watermarks; Manage fonts and colors; Combine multiple PDFs, split or join them.
Secure your PDFs: Set passwords, editing and printing permissions and choose from 40 or 128 bit encryption levels.
Schedule PDF Tasks: The server can be set to operate at specific times and dates. Files can be processed in middle of the night if desired.
Set Up Monitored Folders/Sub Folders: Automate PDF creation by specifying a folder for placing input files.
Email Integration: Converted files are processed and the result is emailed back to the sender.
Job Ticket Creation: The Job Ticket Editor is used for specifying PDF creation and extraction settings.

Given the features above, using Absolute PDF Server naturally comes with a few fringe benefits:

Increases Productivity. Improve the enterprise’s productivity and efficiency by managing processes on the backend.
Creates A Standardized System. IT Administrators can schedule, monitor, and keep track of tasks from one location. Document management is streamlined organization wide.
Unlimited Number of Users & Conversions. That’s right, unlimited. This means multiple users can convert as many files as they need, when they need.
Cost Effective. Absolute PDF Server is sold on a per license, per server basis. No individual licenses or subscriptions required. There are no extra modules or add-ins to buy later on.

So is enterprise-level PDF conversion right for your company? Find out. Get your IT manager to test out Absolute PDF Server’s features before taking the plunge! We offer a free 30-day trial for organizations.

For more details, contact our support team directly.

Able2Doc 7.0 Tip: Taking A Snapshot From PDF Documents

Despite the pressing need to work with PDF content, PDF conversion, despite all its benefits, might not always be what you need. Think of those times when you need just a snippet of PDF content in a document, like when you conduct research with PDF files, for instance.

Copying and pasting on your computer is probably the first thing that comes to mind. It’s a common, yet often messy, way of getting text or images into MS Word documents quickly. However, the results you have to edit afterwards are one major reason why PDF conversion is usually the better option.

But knowing that our users may still want the option of doing so, our desktop converters include a Snapshot feature. It gives you a way to create a proper snapshot of selected PDF content. For a more detailed look, here’s a walk through on the feature and how you can take a snapshot with Able2Doc 7.0.

1. Open your PDF file in Able2Doc 7.0

2. Go to Edit> Take Snapshot. This will activate the feature and let you select a portion of the active PDF to be saved to the Clipboard as an image

Take Snapshot feature in Able2Doc

3. Using your mouse, select the image or content that you would like to save as an image, as you would normally select an area for converting PDF content

Selecting PDF content for Snapshot

4. Once the selection has been made, you’ll get a popup letting you know that the content has been saved to the clipboard

Copying PDF content to clipboard

5. Go to the file or document where you need to insert the content. Then simply paste the content from your clipboard using CTRL + V or by selecting Paste from the right click context menu.

Pasting PDF content in Word

This tip is also applicable to Able2Extract PDF Converter. For scanned PDF documents, the only selection method available is area-based selection (this option enables data to be selected on a column-by-column or section-by-section basis rather than line by line).

So if you ever find yourself needing a quick image of your PDF content, the snapshot feature can get the job done easily.