Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with osx and pdf

Please recommend PDF indexing software for OS X.

NucleophilicAttack — Sun, 13 Sep 2009 08:41:35 -0800

Please recommend OS X software which can generate indexes from PDF files. Freeware is best, but shareware is also fine. I have a number of PDFs which are several hundred pages in length, for which I would like to generate indexes. Some wishlist features:

* indexes both rare words, and words from a list.
* can adjust the page numbers it outputs to match the actual numbering on each page of the PDF, rather than the logical page numbers.
* tweakable with respect to what kind of words get indexed, and what kind do not

Powerpoint to PDF conversion

roofus — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 14:38:41 -0800

How do I set up my printer prefs / page settings to save an A0 size Powerpoint slide as a PDF? Macbook running OS X 10.4 and Powerpoint 2004. I need to convert an A0 Powerpoint slide to a PDF for printing as a poster. At present the "Print" dialogue box shows a blank slide in preview, and is indeed saving it as a blank PDF when I choose "Save as PDF". Checking the "Scale to fit paper" checkbox produces a correct preview image, but only at A4 size.

How can I increase contrast on a multi-page PDF?

Outis — Sun, 22 Feb 2009 08:24:53 -0800

How can I quickly and easily increase the contrast on every page of a PDF? I have a PDF that is 200 pages long in which the paper rendered from the scan somewhat grey and some of the text from the opposite side is still visible. I know I just need to increase the contrast a little and it would taken care of. How can I do this? I have many PDF files like this so it's merely a test run.

I'm also hoping to remove some of the annotations someone made to the text before it was scanned. Other suggestions?

I'm on a Mac using Acrobat and and I've got Photoshop if it's absolutely necessary.

Free software to write on PDFs with my tablet?

jk252b — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 13:55:10 -0800

PDF editing software for Mac to use with my Wacom tablet? I recently bought a Wacom Bamboo tablet thinking it would revolutionize my graduate school research by allowing me to write directly on PDF documents without having to print them out.

Does anyone know of software that exists to allow me to write directly on PDF documents, and save them in their original format.

I know about Skim but that doesn't work to draw directly on the page.

FormulatePro starts to get at what I want, but any documents you write on are saved in the ".formulate". I know I can print to PDF, which is better than nothing, but it's an annoying step that I'd like to avoid if I can.

It seems like PDFpen and PDFclerk do what I want, but I'd prefer NOT to pay $50 after having spent $70 on the tablet.

Does any freeware or really cheap (<20$) software exist to do this?

Preview isn't previewing pdfs properly

bluefly — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 10:26:42 -0800

I'm having trouble viewing pdfs using Preview on my Mac (OS 10.4.11). Parts of the document don't show up. I usually have to close the file and reopen it several times before the entire document renders properly. Has anyone else had this problem, and were you able to fix it? And, if so, how? I should add that I tried downloading an alternate pdf viewer (Skim) to see if that would fix the problem, but it didn't. The pdfs themselves aren't bad, as they open just fine on my (Windows) laptop. They come from all different sources. As a data point, I don't notice this phenomenon on documents that are scanned from paper and then converted to pdf (like old articles).

Picture a Venn diagram with 3 circles: LaTeX, Emacs, Mac. I'd like to live in the intersection.

gleuschk — Sat, 04 Oct 2008 11:08:47 -0800

Mac users who write LaTeX documents in Emacs (with or without AucTeX), please tell me about your workflow. My wife and I both recently switched (back) to Macs from Windows machines. We're mathematicians, and we both live -- or used to live -- pretty much completely inside an Emacs buffer, writing LaTeX. We've had a terrible time approximating our Windows setups on the new Macs. What Emacs version do you people use? (I've tried Aquamacs and Carbon Emacs.) What PDF previewer? (Skim, Preview, something else?) Most importantly: how is everything tied together, in your .emacs or elsewhere?

Finally, please help me understand what the point of AucTeX is. Both the emacs versions I've tried come with it pre-installed. So far, all I can see is that it adds unnecesary keystrokes when I want to typeset something, and destroys all my useful muscle-memory. Do you use it? Does it make your life better/easier?

Fonts-be-gone (from my PDF)!

heresiarch — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 15:07:00 -0800

Why are there 20 Mb of embedded fonts in my PDF and how can I make them go away? I've run into a pretty obscure Word/OSX/PDF problem that I'm hoping to get some insight on. I just finished working on a relatively substantial Word document. The Word document itself is around 11 meg, and I've pretty diligently compressed figures to keep the file from getting too large. When I PDF this file (using the PDF button in the standard OS X print dialog box), it comes out around 28 Mb. When I run "Assess Space Usage" on the file using Acrobat Pro 8, it tells me that the vast majority of the file is embedded fonts.

The "Optimize PDF..." tool will show me the embedded fonts, and indeed there are a million of them. I'm using two main fonts (Meta and Hoefler Text) with a bunch of varieties for, e.g., footers, different header levels, figure captions, etc. In the embedded font list I get mostly entries for those two fonts (a standard entry would be "MetaBoldLF-Roman (Subset)", repeated many tens of times), with a handful of entries for fonts I'm not intentionally using but might have somehow snuck in anyway (Times and Arial). Any attempt to use the Optimize PDF tool to remove fonts will crash Acrobat.

I've printed a single page PDF and tried removing fonts from that. It seems to work okay, although I can't really tell if removing fonts causes problems in the output. I suspect since I have the fonts that are embedded, it will display the same for me regardless of whether or not it's embedded. I've also tried using the "Reduce File Size" option. That reliably crashes Acrobat at the very end of the process. This happens to other people I've had try it, too. I've tried using Acrobat Distiller from Word, but pressing the "convert to PDF" button on their toolbar does absolutely nothing. No idea why not.

So, is there any hope for me? My main goal is to get the file size lower without changing the appearance. I feel like there should be some way to remove most of the embedded fonts and just embed each font once and have it work out. Is this wishful thinking? What's causing this proliferation of embedded fonts? Are they each mapped to Word styles, or something?

I'm happy to give a link to the PDF or Word file if you want to play with them yourself, but since they're loaded with personally identifying information I'd rather not publicly link to them. MeMail me for links.

Thanks!

markup!

Pants! — Mon, 19 May 2008 18:47:01 -0800

I want to highlight and otherwise mark-up a PDF document in OSX. Unfortunately, it seems that the author somehow protected the file. In Preview, all of the items under Tools, Markup are grayed out. What to do?

Making Digital Booklets for iTunes on OSX

drgonzo2k2 — Sun, 14 Oct 2007 08:44:07 -0800

I have the artwork/booklets for a number of CDs scanned in, and I would like to edit them and convert them to a PDF for use as a digital booklet in iTunes on OSX. What is the easiest way to go about doing this? Bonus points if I don't have to buy any software!

.chm to .pdf conversion in Mac OS X?

Señor Pantalones — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 14:11:51 -0800

.chm to PDF conversion, Mac OS X. There seems to be no easy way to do it. Does anyone have an effective and trustworthy workflow they can recommend? (more inside) After recently switching to Papers for my eBook/journal librarian, I need to get rid of all these pesky .chm files. So far I've tried...

- Tubby (chm expander) to Acrobat Professional. Works, but you need to manually nest chapters and subchapters, and it throws some ugly markup artifacts into the document.

- Tubby to HTMLDoc (cli binary). Does a nice job converting to PDF, better than Acrobat, but spits it all out as one big unordered file, which needs far more reorganization.

- Chamonix -> Print. Only prints single pages as pdf, not entire document.

- chm2pdf (python). Looks promising but even after compiling for OS X it keeps failing...maybe I am doing something wrong.

Any tips would be appreciated, and if you haven't checked out Papers yet, you'll love it...

Adobe Reader 8 ruined Save as PDF in OS X

airguitar — Thu, 18 Jan 2007 17:40:40 -0800

I installed Acrobat Reader 8. OS X no longer prints to PDF. How do I fix that? The PDF Workflow menu is missing, hidden, gone, obscured; as well as a little of the Cancel button. I know the PDF menu is there, because it appears briefly just after I click Cancel; too quickly to capture with Shift-Apple-3.
pic

The File menu option is gone.
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The checkbox under Output Options is greyed out.
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I followed the instructions for removing 6 or 7 on a Mac. That didn't work.

Reinstalled 8 and searched the help for 'uninstall'.
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No pages contain 'uninstall'.

The PDF Workflow menu should be enabled, un-hidden.
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After much Googling, I'm at a loss. It seems I could buy the full version of Acrobat, or reinstall OS X. What else can I do?

Is there an easier way to get to "Save as PDF" on my Mac?

grieserm — Fri, 15 Dec 2006 06:42:54 -0800

I really love the baked-in "Save to PDF" function that OS 10 has. I love it so much, that I often have multiple things that I want to save as PDF. It is a little inconvenient/inefficient to go through five or six pages, hit cmd-p, click "PDF", select "Save as PDF", hit return, hit return again, for each file. It would be much easier if I could punch in one key combo and have the "Save" dialog box come up, with "PDF" in the format. Please help. Anyone know a way to make this happen?

Type on top of a PDF with Typewriter Tool

stewiethegreat — Fri, 17 Nov 2006 21:14:59 -0800

Acrobat Pro Typewriter Tool question - it's greyed out! I'm trying to fill in a pdf that hasn't incorporated fields, and heard that I can use Acrobat Pro's typewriter tool to add text on top of a document. I have Acrobat Pro 7.0.8 for Mac OS X, but for some reason the tool and all of its subtools are greyed out. One other symptom: the snapshot tool is also unavailable...

What do I need to do to access the typewriter tool on this document? I didn't have to enter a password to open it, it's not locked or write-only in the Finder, so it seems to have no access restrictions.

Any help is greatly appreciated - my handwriting is terrible, so it would be great if I could do it this way.

How do I view a PDF in Firefox 2.0 on Mac OS 10.4.8?

DakotaPaul — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:17:52 -0800

Trying to view a PDF in Firefox 2.0 on an Intel iMac is even more of a pain in the butt that it was in Fx 1.5.0.7. What am I doing wrong? In Fx 1.5.0.7, when I clicked a PDF link the file would at least download automatically (sometimes) so I could view it in Preview. Now, however, clicking the link just opens a empty browser window, with the URL of the PDF in the address box.

I am aware that the Adobe PDF plugin won't work, but Schubert's PDF plugin doesn't work either. I have that plugin in both ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins and ~/Users/me/Library/Internet Plug-Ins. I'm on an Intel iMac running OS 10.4.8. Help!

Making PDFs out of Word Docs and Preserving Embedded Links

hwickline — Thu, 28 Sep 2006 11:01:14 -0800

How can I make a .pdf of a .doc file that maintains the copious hyperlinks in the original MS Word doc on Mac OS 10.4? So I've got a Word document with a TON of links in it (created using Insert/ Hyperlink...), and OS X's built-in PDF maker (through the Print dialog box) doesn't create those as clickable links.

I've tried a couple things mentioned in similar AskMe threads, including Jaws PDF Maker, Adobe's online service, and pdfonline.com. Jaws won't even create an openable file, and the two online services work great, so long as I don't mind all my fonts being replaced with Courier, which I kind of do.

I've got Acrobat 5.0, and know I can create them manually with that, but Good God there's a lot of 'em, and I'd like to avoid going down that road.

Selecting text from PDF in Preview

raheel — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 12:01:24 -0800

Some PDFs in Preview (OS X) have quite a fuzzy text even at high zoom, and I can't select the text (which is the main problem). Is there some remedy for this?

Adding a text to every page of a PDF?

gwint — Fri, 30 Jun 2006 08:26:41 -0800

Is there a tool for OS X (preferably free) that can easily allow me to add a small bit of text to every page of a book-length PDF without having to add it manually to each page? I need to add something like "Gwint's Manuscript Title" to the top left corner of every page of a PDF. I don't have the source file that created the PDF, so I need an app that can alter the PDF and then resave it with my changes.

Word 2004 makes bad PDF?

Wolfdog — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 12:14:36 -0800

Has anyone experienced Word 2004 on OS X generating malformed PDF? I have a friend who constantly has difficulty printing documents (that typically have a lot of equation editor objects in them.) If you try to print directly from Word to our (somewhat old) LaserJet 4, the printer tries to process the job, but fails, printing nothing. I can save the file as PDF from Preview, then use ImageMagick to convert it PostScript; the resulting ps prints fine, and the converter points out that there were errors in the source PDF (eg, "Warning: File has an invalid xref entry: 55. Rebuilding xref table.")

I'd be happy if anyone can simply, confirm experiencing similar problems, and delighted if there's a fix. There is an Office 2004 service pack available, but I intend to hold off on installing that until I gather a little data here.

Am I asking too much of iCal?

NewGear — Sun, 28 Aug 2005 18:24:49 -0800

[OSX FILTER] I want to print on index cards, but indirectly. Help me figure out how to print to a PDF sized at 3"x5". Okay, so I've decided to follow the crowd (or at least a segment of the crowd) and start using a variation of the Hipster PDA. I want to print out my daily, weekly, and monthly calendars from iCal onto 3x5 index cards. I'd like to use OSX's "save as PDF" function to print the files as PDFs, then take them to work where I can print them to my heart's content for free. The problem is, when I try to print them, the month header and the little colour-coded guide to the different calendar types take up most of the card, and the actual meat of the information, the calendar itself, is all crammed into a space the height of a centimeter, and is run-together and worthless.

Currently, I'm creating a custom paper size of 3"x5" in Page Setup, turning off the "Print To-Do Lists" and "Print Mini-Months" options in the Print Dialog under "iCal", and then saving them as PDF. I'm running OSX 10.3.9, and iCal 1.5.5.

Is there any hope of getting iCal to print nice, clean calendars (monthly, weekly, and daily) onto 3x5 index cards, or am I SOL with iCal and need to migrate to some other program? I was so hoping this would be easy...

PDF conversion with hyperlinks in OpenOffice?

inksyndicate — Tue, 24 Aug 2004 12:35:21 -0800

OpenOffice question. Is there an easy way to convert documents to PDF such that the hyperlinks still work? I'm on OS X.