So, I’ve shown my irritation with Adobe Acrobat a few times over the years. A bigger issue … creating the PDF’s costs money (you have to buy the full version of Acrobat). So it’s great as an end-user technology (similar to Flash, etc) but sucks for developers who just want to play with it.
So it was a pleasant surprise when I discovered the advanced features buried in Microsoft Office Document Imaging. It’s pretty strong in the scanning and OCR department. And it is already installed on your computer as part of MS Office.
I’ve used it a few times but didn’t bother to see what else it could do other than allow me to Print To an .mdi file (for archival purposes).
Read more details at the Student TabletPC blog.
So, if you are in the market for Adobe Acrobat, it might make sense to try out MODI before you buy Adobe.
Wish Microsoft would make a better choice of what it markets and to whom!
23 May 2007 at 8:00 am
Meh.
Tex and bretheren have had postscript and PDF output for years, and PDF is an open standard with well published specs (except for Adobe’s proprietary extensions that they keep throwing in with each release of Acrobat).
Most F/OSS software (examples: OpenOffice.org, Inkscape, Scribus, GIMP, even the venerable XFig) have had an “export to PDF” option, which usually generates postscript output and pushes it through a ps2pdf step.
Acrobat itself, though, tends to be rather buggy, both on Linux and winblows. Which is why, unless I come across a PDF with proprietary extensions, I use Evince.
28 May 2007 at 10:31 pm
Yup Jim, my problems with PDF are mostly related to Acrobat itself.
Unfortunately, developing for a non technical crown (read salespeople and office staff) requires that I also test all (PDF related) development on Acrobat (7.x and 8.x both, weird, huh?!) and not have a choice of another PDF viewer.
Again, the problem is always with one of the “pre-installed” pieces of software. We don’t sell in a world where people will go and download (and more importantly) learn a new piece of software just because I tell them to!
:-(