pdf - ReadWriteWeb http://www.readwriteweb.com/feeds/tag/pdf en Copyright 2009 Richard MacManus readwriteweb@gmail.com Sun, 22 Nov 2009 08:05:49 -0800 http://www.sixapart.com/movabletype/?v=4.23-en http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss FoxIt PDF Reader Security Patches Now Available FoxIt Software, makers of the popular free alternative PDF reader, FoxIt Reader, announced patches for three public vulnerabilities that were discovered in the past few weeks. With all the press attention focused on Adobe's Acrobat PDF reader, it may have gone somewhat overlooked that FoxIt Reader also had some weaknesses. In this case, FoxIt has managed to get the jump on Adobe as well, releasing their patches first.

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]]> FoxIt Software has provided the free, lightweight alternative PDF reader application since 2001. They have made a name for themselves by providing a product that is not only fully compatible with the Acrobat PDF format, but also with a small disk and memory footprint while doing so. They have carried this philosophy over to their mobile offerings as well, providing complete PDF viewers for Windows Mobile and other embedded operating systems.

Their premier product has had its own share of exploits over the years, which are not necessarily the same as the vulnerabilities that Adobe's Acrobat Reader has faced. Computerworld Magazine's security blog reports that the current FoxIt Reader vulnerabilities are different here:

The Foxit and Adobe bugs are unrelated, however, except for the fact that they are both in the code that parses JBIG2 images, said Thomas Kristensen, chief technology officer at Secunia, the Danish company that reported the flaw to Foxit. "It is a completely different vulnerability related to JBIG2," Kristensen said in an e-mail today.

FoxIt Reader has an integrated update system, so current users should be able to get the latest update automatically, or via the Check For Updates Now link in the Help pull-down menu. The patch details are also available from FoxIt directly.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/foxit_pdf_reader_security_patches_now_available.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/foxit_pdf_reader_security_patches_now_available.php News Mon, 09 Mar 2009 18:40:00 -0800 Phil Glockner
Bring New Life to Static Documents with Adam Don't you hate it when you click a link only to discover it wasn't a web page, but a slow-loading PDF instead? Maybe it's time for publishers to find something to do with those PDFs that makes them a lot more interesting and engaging for their site's users. A new mashup tool called Adam (Beta) can help. It lets you take static files like PDFs and images and mash them up with web content like HTML and multimedia. Adam then provides you with an embed code so you can display these new remixed files on your web site.

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Originally designed as a solution for e-commerce sites, the service strangely called Adam is not complicated to use. However, the company does estimate that the time it takes from mashup creation to having it live on your web site could be approximately 20 minutes. That's a little bit longer than just linking to a PDF or even uploading it to a document-hosting service like Scridb or Issuu. Still, the extra time may be worth it because Adam lets you create a truly interactive document by allowing you to add videos, HTML, stylized text, and more to what were previously just plain files.

For those familiar with designing web pages, the process may seem familiar. To add content to a document on Adam, you select various "hotspots" in the document and then add the content you want to mashup. This is where you would paste in any text, images, music, or videos you want to appear when the user mouses over that part of the document. The service currently integrates with other content providers including YouTube, flickr, metacafe, Veoh, vimeo, and imeem.

The best way to understand what Adam can do, though, is to view some sample of it in action. You can check out a mashed up floor plan or you can see all the content providers in use on one document.

Adam doesn't provide anything that a talented web designer can't already do on their own, but like every service that comes out of the Web 2.0 movement, it's about letting everyone have access to the tools that previously only skilled professionals knew how to use. If you want to try Adam for yourself, you can sign up here.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bring_new_life_to_static_documents_with_adam.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/bring_new_life_to_static_documents_with_adam.php Mashups Tue, 23 Dec 2008 06:06:46 -0800 Sarah Perez
Yahoo! PDF Ads In the Wild on Kevin Kelly's Latest Book Kevin Kelly may be best known as the founding executive editor of Wired magazine, but he's also a long-time blogger and the author of numerous books. One of those books, True Films, has just been updated for a third edition. The book collects Kelly's 200 favorite documentaries reviewed on his site of the same name. "I only review films I love and believe others will enjoy. Merely good films are left unmentioned," says Kelly. Previous editions of the book have been sold via Amazon, Lulu, or as a paid download via Kelly's own site. That the book was updated a second time is unremarkable. What is noteworthy, is that Kelly is giving the book away for free as a PDF and monetizing it with contextual text advertising.

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]]> In November, Adobe and Yahoo! announced a partnership that yielded the clunkily named Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo!. The basic premise was that using the program, publishers could monetize offline PDF content by serving contextually relevant text ads alongside it.

Kelly is using the PDF Ads for True Films 3.0. Kelly calls the use of the ads an experiment. "If it works with you readers to the same degree that ad-supported blogs have, it is not hard to imagine thousands of books being released for free with ads on the side," writes Kelly on his blog. "To some in publishing this prospect is the end of the world. The final stake in the heart of good old books. Ads-in-books specifically have been a bogeyman too horrible for them to even think about. [...] I am more pragmatic. I actually like the Google contextual ads on Cool Tools. They bring up choices I would have never encountered, yet they are fairly unobtrusive until you are looking. Why not do the same for books?"

But there are a couple of major obstacles to PDF Ads that I see in this initial iteration. The first is that the ads are opt-in. Because Acrobat Reader needs to connect to Adobe to download the ad content, it first asks for permission (the PDF files are scanned by Yahoo!'s content matching system before you download them, so the Yahoo! robot isn't actually scanning a file on your computer, but it will try to connect to Adobe each time you open to the file to attempt to download the most up-to-date ads). Will people really opt-in to view ads? Hardcore supporters of the author might, but since they're paid on a per click basis, if the people clicking on the ads are only doing so out of support for the author, isn't the advertiser losing out? That's not going to likely be high quality traffic.

The other major hurdle is that the content matching sucks. While reading True Film 3.0, I didn't see one ad that had anything to do with film or documentaries or even the subjects that any of the documentaries being reviewed were about. Instead, the ads were about unrelated things like travel and real estate -- they looks more like broadly purchased defaults (low paying inventory filling ads) than actual contextually matched advertisements. In order for PDF ads to warrant any notice from readers, they'll have to get a lot more relevant.

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http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_pdf_ads_kevin_kelly.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/yahoo_pdf_ads_kevin_kelly.php Products Fri, 04 Jan 2008 12:11:02 -0800 Josh Catone