Manipulate PDF files for free with PDFRider

PDFRider (currently in version 0.5) is an open source project on Codeplex. This utility provides a GUI for the command-line program Pdftk. It can perform the following operations on PDF files -

• Merge PDF documents 
• Insert pages from PDF file to another 
• Extract pages from a PDF document to a new document 
• Delete pages 
• Rotate pages 
• Crypt and Decrypt a PDF file 
• Burst or split a single, input PDF document into individual pages

I used it to extract summaries of chapters from a PDF eBook & then merge them all together into a mini PDF ebook.

The UI of PDFRider looks amateurish & needs a lot of improvement. I badly missed the keyboard shortcut to save the manipulated files. Considering it's free, open-source & it did the job quickly without errors, I can't really complain though. It felt faster than PDFSAM which I tried a few years ago. 

Also see:

• HOW TO mimic Google Search/GMail's “View as HTML” feature to browse PDFs/Word docs online
• HOW TO convert authenticated / protected pages to PDF

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A Product is as good as it's Documentation & Community Support

I feel, the success of any product relies heavily on the documentation available for it & it's helpfulness to developers. If there is an active community around it that collaborates through Forums, it can boost the confidence of neophytes working with it & take the product to greater heights. Sometimes the documentation contributed by community members is more effective than the original documentation which is generally provided as a formality & cloaked in jargon. The following are some examples of independent contributions that I have benefited from -

• Mikesdotnetting's multi-part series on ITextSharp. The open-source PDF library creator Bruno's documentation is good as well.
• Kevin Gao's Visual SourceSafe (VSS) Tutorial
• The "An Extensive Examination of .." series on various .NET topics by Scott Mitchell
• Dave Wanta's very comprehensive FAQs on the System.Web.Mail & System.Net.Mail namespaces related to emailing

(to be continued...)

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PDF Security - a myth?

In the whitepaper "How Secure is PDF?", Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) Bryan Guignard's conclusion on PDF security is -

The only way your property can be safe is if you keep it to yourself.

The site Giveaway Of The Day (GAOTD) is even giving away a commercial tool called Recover PDF Password for free. This tool unlocks restricted PDF documents & recovers passwords of protected PDF files.

As per comments at GAOTD, this isn't also the only tool. This comes as a rude surprise to me.

Sometimes, ignorance is not bliss.

Also see:
PDFZilla overrides PDF's copy protection
PDF Anatomy 101
A Web App Is As Secure As You Make It & the Browser It Runs On

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Save the Earth

Just in case you haven't heard of it yet or seen it, HOME is a documentary movie by Yann Arthus-Bertrand with breathtaking photography on how we can preserve the Earth before it's too late. It is available for free viewing on YouTube.

Synopsis of the documentary:

In 200,000 years on Earth, humanity has upset the balance of the planet, established by nearly four billion years of evolution. The price to pay is high, but it is too late to be a pessimist: humanity has barely ten years to reverse the trend, become aware of the full extent of its spoliation of the Earth's riches and change its patterns of consumption.

If you are concerned about the environment, you should also take a look at the book Blue Planet Run: The Race to Provide Safe Drinking Water to the World. It tells the thought-provoking story of the drinking water crisis across the world through 250 photographs by the world’s top photojournalists. You can download the book in PDF format for free from Amazon.

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PDFZilla overrides PDF's copy protection

Giveaway Of The Day recently offered a FREE licensed copy of PDFZilla. PDFZilla has a option to convert a PDF to Word, RTF or text file format.

I was a little surprised to discover that it can even convert PDFs with copy protection and as a result text can be copied from the converted file. I (naively?) believed that the a PDFs copy protection property was unbreakable. In fact there seem to be other tools as well that can bypass a PDF's copy protection.

I wanted to share this finding so that others wanting to protect their PDFs are not under the mistaken belief that the protection mechanism is reliable.

Also see:
HOW TO convert authenticated / protected pages to PDF
Set PDF security settings with OpenOffice

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