HOW TO EDIT PDF FILES WITHOUT ADOBE ACROBAT

The PDF file format was originally created by Adobe in the early ’90s and there are now over 700+ million PDF documents on the Internet according to Google (search for filetype:pdf).
There are several reasons why the PDF file format is so popular for exchanging all sorts of documents including presentations, CAD Drawings, invoices and even legal forms.

• PDF files are generally more compact (smaller in size) than the source document and they preserve the original formatting.
• Unlike Word and other popular document formats, the content of a PDF file cannot be modified easily. You can also prevent other users from printing or copying text from PDF documents.
• You can open a PDF file on any computer or mobile device with free software like Adobe Acrobat Reader. Google Chrome can read PDFs without requiring plugins and it can create PDFs.

Edit PDF Files using Free Alternatives to Adobe Acrobat

While PDF Files are “read only” by default, there are ways by which you can edit certain elements* of a PDF document for free without requiring the source files or any of the commercial PDF editing tools like Adobe Acrobat.
We will primarily focus on tools that let you alter the actual contents of a PDF file>. If you are looking to manipulate the PDF file structure itself like rearranging pages or merging multiple PDFs into one, please refer to this detailed Adobe PDF Guide.

An Online PDF Editor for Basic Tasks

Sometimes you need to make minor changes to a PDF file. For instance, you may want to hide your personal phone number from a PDF file before uploading it online or may want to annotate a page with notes and freehand drawings.
You can perform such edits in a PDF easily with PDFEscape.com, an online PDF editor that is free and also lets you edit password-protected PDF documents in the browser.
With PDF Escape, you can hide* parts of a PDF file using the whiteout tool or add annotations with the help of custom shapes, arrows, text boxes and sticky notes. You can add hyperlinks to other PDF pages / web documents.

[*] Hiding is different from redaction because here we aren’t changing the associated metadata of a PDF file but just hiding certain visible parts of a PDF file by pasting an opaque rectangle over that region so that the stuff beneath the rectangle stays invisible.

Change Metadata of PDF Files

If you would like to edit the meta-data associated* with a PDF document, check out Becy PDFMetaEdit. This is a free utility that can help you edit properties of a PDF document including the title, author name, creation data, keywords, etc.
The tool can also be used for removing PDF passwords as well as for encrypting PDF documents such that only users who know the password can read the contents of your PDF files. And since this PDF metadata plus bookmarks editor can be executed from the command line, you can use it to update information in multiple PDF files in a batch.

[*] If you planning to post your PDF files on the web, you should consider adding proper metadata to all the files as that will help improve the organic rankings of your PDF files in Google search results.

Edit the Text of a PDF File

If you want to edit the text in a PDF file but don’t have access to the source documents, your best bet is that you convert the PDF file into an editable Word document or an Excel spreadsheet depending on the contents of the PDF.
Then edit these converted PDFs in Microsoft Office (or Google Docs) and export the modified files back into PDF format using any PDF writer.
If your PDF document is mostly text, you may use the desktop version of Stanza to convert that PDF into a Word document. If the document includes images, charts, tables and other complex formatting, try the online PDF to Word converter from BCL Research or the one from NitroPDF – the former offers instant conversion while the latter service can take up to a day though its yields more accurate results.

Advanced PDF Editing (Images, text, etc.)

Now that you know the basic PDF editing tools, let’s look at another set of PDF editors that are also free but can help you do some more advanced editing like replacing images on a PDF file, adding signatures, removing blocks of text without breaking the flow of the document, etc.
First there’s PDF XChange, a free PDF viewer and editor that you also may use for typing text directly on any PDF page. PDF XChange also supports image stamps so you may use the tool for signing PDF files or for inserting images anywhere on a PDF page.
Then you have Inkscape, a free vector drawing tool (like Adobe Illustrator) that can natively import and export PDF content.

Video: How to Edit PDF Files with Inkscape

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuLcIn0aqJk
With Inkscape, you can select any object on a PDF page (including text, graphics, tables, etc.) and move them to a different location or even remove them permanently from the PDF file. You can also annotate PDF files with Inkscape or draw freehand on a page using the built-in pencil tool.
The next tool in the category of advanced PDF editors is OpenOffice Draw with the PDFImport extension. OpenOffice Draw supports inline editing so you can easily fix typos in a PDF document or make formatting related changes like replacing color, increasing or decreasing the text size, replacing the default font-family, etc.
Like Inkscape, the OpenOffice toolbox also includes support for annotations, shapes, images, tables, charts, etc. but here you have more choices and the software also looks less complex.

The OpenOffice suite is a little bulky (they don’t provide a standalone installer for Draw) but if you have the bandwidth, OpenOffice is the best tool for manipulating PDF documents when you don’t have the budget for Adobe Acrobat.

  USEFUL BLOG ADD-ON'S AND TOOLS TO IMPROVE VISITOR'S EXPERIENCE

Here’s a collection of most useful blog add-ons or extras that can be easily integrated with any website and will help in enhancing your visitors’ experience.
All these 15 add-ons are free and you don’t have to be a geek to use them on your site.
1. Google Talk Badge – This badge will enable site visitors to get in touch with you quickly. They won’t need a Google account and the badge is enabled only when you are online. Alternative is meebo me.
2. Web2PDF Online – Love this. People can download your articles as PDF files with a click. The PDFs are free of any advertising and you also get full access to stats so you know what articles downloaded most, etc. (example)
3. Zoho Creator – If you ever need to create web forms for your blog, use Zoho Creator. It lets you customize the form layouts, there are no data limits and best of all, readers can upload file attachments while submitting the form.
4. HP Blog Printing – This makes your blog printer friendly. Visitors can pick blog posts that they want to print and only the text + images get printed. Everything else including banners, sidebars, etc. are cut off from the printed version.
5. Outbrain Ratings – The is the best way to add ratings to your blog posts. Outbrain offers two extra advantages as well – your readers can find more stories related to the one they are currently reading and two, they can rate stories even from feed readers.
6. ShareThis or AddThis – They help reduce clutter on your blog by neatly arranging icons in a CSS drop-down that appears only on mouse hover. Both are similar though I prefer AddThis as it is loads faster and allows branding.
7. Google Feed Wizard – This is useful if you have to embed RSS feeds in your blog – you can create blocks in either horizontal or vertical format. If your need options other than AJAX, try these RSS widgets or the static Google Gadgets.
8. Skribit – This is again a great tool to get feedback and opinions from your site visitors.
For instance, you can put up a question like "What should I write about" or "How Can I improve" in the sidebar and readers can add opinions anonymously.  They can even vote on suggestions left by other visitors. See example.
9. who.amung.us – This helps you and your readers know how many people are currently on the site and what pages are they reading.  No sign-up required and amung.us will even tell you the exact location of different visitors on a map.
10. Eco Safe Badge – This badge allows website visitors to send a full copy of your web page to any email address in HTML or PDF format. Alternatively, they can download a PDF version of the page in a click. The whole idea is to discourage visitors from printing web pages.
11. Meebo Rooms – This allows visitors on your website to interact with each other inside a chat room. Other options worth exploring include Google Lively but again, Lively requires installation at the client’s end.
12. Scribd iPaper – If you frequently link to PDF files and Microsoft Office documents like doc or xls, the Scribd iPaper add-on will make sure that your content remains accessible even to readers who don’t have Microsoft Office or Adobe Reader.
You simply copy-and-paste a small block of code into your webpage, and QuickSwitch converts all the documents in your blog into Flash Paper format hosted on Scribd. If you only link to PDF files, try PDFMeNote script.
13. Yahoo! Media Player – If you have an audio blog or frequently link to MP3 files, integrate the Yahoo! media players in your blog template – this auto-detects any MP3 links and creates an embedded player so you are saved from all the hard work.
14. Translate Gadget – This lets your non-English speaking visitors translate articles from your website in their native language using Google Translation.
Alternatively, you can create your own translation box with language flags or through a different translation service.
15. Digg Your Blog – A good Digg widget that doesn’t get much attention.
Unlike the regular "Digg This" buttons, this widget creates a list of posts from your own blog that are currently getting votes on Digg. Put it in your sidebar to highlight "recently popular" content.

       5 COOL CLOUD COMPUTING                    RESEARCH PROJECTS

*Nebulas
Researchers from the University of Minnesota have outlined a way to use "distributed voluntary resources -- those donated by end-user hosts -- to form nebulas" that would potentially complement today's managed clouds from companies such as Amazon, IBM and Google. Nebulas could address the needs of service classes that more traditional clouds could not, providing more scalability, more geographical dispersion of nodes and lower cost, the researchers say. Possible users would include those rolling out experimental cloud services and those looking to offer free public services or applications.
Unlike famed volunteer-based computing resources such as SETI@home (now BOINC), nebulas would need to support more complex tasks. Challenges needing to be addressed would include managing highly distributed data and computational resources and coping with failures. "We believe that nebulas can exist as complementary infrastructures to clouds, and can even serve as a transition pathway for many services that would eventually be hosted on clouds," the researchers write in a paper titled "Nebulas: Using Distributed Voluntary Resources to Build Clouds."
(University of Minnesota researchers have a separate project dubbed "Virtual Putty" that sounds intriguing as well. It focuses on the reshaping of virtual machine footprints to satisfy user needs and ease VM management for resource providers.)
* CloudViews
Amidst the hype surrounding cloud computing, security issues are often raised, such as those involved with multiple customers having their data and applications sharing the same cloud resources. But researchers at the University of Washington also see lots of opportunity in the fact that Web services and applications will be so closely situated. CloudViews is a Hadoop HBase-supported common storage system being developed by the researchers "to facilitate collaboration through protected inter-service data sharing." The researchers say in a paper called "CloudViews: Communal Data Sharing in Public Clouds" that public cloud providers must facilitate such collaboration -- in the form of data driven, server side mashups -- to ensure the market's growth through development of new Web services.
* Trusted Cloud Computing Platform
Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Software Systems have outlined a Trusted Cloud Computing Platform that "enables Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) providers such as Amazon EC2 to provide a closed box execution environment that guarantees confidential execution of guest virtual machines." Such a platform would assure customers that service providers haven't been messing with their data and would enable service providers to secure data even across many VMs. The researchers, in a paper titled "Towards Trusted Cloud Computing," acknowledge that details of how cloud providers set up their data centers is held pretty close to the vest, but base their system on an open source offering called Eucalyptus that they suspect is similar to at least some commercial implementations. A prototype based on the design is this research team's next step.

* Private Virtual Infrastructure (PVI) and Locator Bot
Also addressing the security and confidentiality issues surrounding cloud computing is University of Maryland, Baltimore County researcher John Krautheim. His proposal is aimed at better sharing the risk responsibility between the cloud provider and customer, giving the customer much more control than is typically the case. "A method of combining the requirements of the user and provider is to let the clients control the security posture of their applications and virtual machines while letting the service provider control the security of the fabric. This provides a symbiotic security stance that can be very powerful provided both parties hold up their end of the agreement," Krautheim writes. He adds that this setup calls for big-time trust on both sides (including support for a virtualized Trusted Platform Module, or TPM, for storing cryptographic keys), since they'll need to share security information between themselves and possibly with others. Components of this approach will include having a method for shutting down VMs if necessary and monitoring/auditing from within and outside the PVI, Krautheim writes in a paper titled "Private Virtual Infrastructure for Cloud Computing."
* Trading storage for computation
One way to make cloud computing more efficient and cost effective might involve rethinking the way data is stored. Researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, NetApp and Pergamum Systems are looking at the trade-offs between storing data, including data that might not be called on that often, and simply recalculating results as needed. In a paper titled "Maximizing Efficiency By Trading Storage for Computation" the researchers write: "Recomputation as a replacement for storage fits well into the holistic model of computing described by the cloud architecture. With its dynamically scalable, and virtualized architecture, cloud computing aims to abstract away the details of underlying infrastructure. In both public and private clouds, the user is encouraged to think in terms of services, not structure."
Determining the best way to store and retrieve data requires a cost-benefits analysis based on insights from both the cloud operator and the data user because "neither has a completely informed view," the researchers write. They argue that the nature of cloud computing, with its dynamically allocated computing resources, could lend itself to storing information about the whereabouts and origins of data and then just recomputing results as needed. But they acknowledge that this sort of system would require forecasting where prices would be headed and figuring out things such as the cost of not being able to immediately access data.