FoxIt Reader Provides Small, Fast PDF Reader

Everybody needs the ability to view PDF files, right? For most users this means you install Adobe Reader. A full install of Adobe Reader v8 takes up 210 MB on your hard drive and it can be a bit slow to load. A new version is on the way with even more features and I fear it will be even larger and slower. We'll soon find out.

The good news is that you don't have to use Adobe Reader to read PDF files. Foxit Reader is much smaller and faster. It only takes 7 MB to install (2.55 MB to download) and it loads lightning fast.

For the past few months I have been working with Foxit Reader and I was hesitate to include it with my CorelDRAW X4 Unleashed book because it wouldn't automatically open the Bookmarks panel even if it was specified in the PDF file. Foxit Reader 2.3 was released about a month ago and it solved this issue. So we're including both Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader with CorelDRAW X4 Unleashed and the user will have the option of which to install, if any.

For those of you developing PDF files, you really need to have both installed so you can test your files in both products. For the rest of you, I'd highly recommend you use Foxit Reader for its smaller footprint and superior speed!

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Adobe Unveils Acrobat 9

About a week ago there was an announcement from Adobe about the upcoming Acrobat 9. One of the biggest features is that Acrobat has native support for Adobe Flash technology. This means you could embed Flash video inside of a PDF file.

The new version will begin shipping on June 26th and I'll be anxiously awaiting a chance to try out the new version. My CorelDRAW X4 Unleashed book uses both PDF and Flash technology to deliver the written word and movies respectively. If I understand the new features correctly, I would be able to embed the movies directly into the PDF file in the future. This will make for one huge PDF file, but it would also integrate the two main features of the book in a really cool way.

Sure, there are other new features and I'll let you read the release to learn about all of them. But it is the integration with Flash that has me excited. If you'd like to order a copy, I've put together a page listing each of the flavors of Acrobat 9 as well as related books.

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CorelDRAW Unleashed Font Substitution Update

If you read the Letters to the Editor in the April/May issue of CorelDRAW Unleashed magazine, you know that some readers are having a problem seeing the correct font when reading the magazine. Thanks to the letter appearing in the magazine, several readers have written me with suggestions. We still don't have a complete answer for the problem, but we've certainly discovered why it happens for some users.

The main font used for body text of the magazine is Georgia. It is a font supplied with most all recent versions of Windows, Microsoft Office, Internet Explorer and more. So, it is a font that most users should have on their systems.

Where things get strange is when users don't have Georgia on their systems. Those are the users who are having the weird font substitution problems. This shouldn't matter as the Georgia font is supposed to be embedded into the magazine. I had a long talk with the fine folks at Ascender Corporation, who created the Georgia font, and we discovered that a weird conversion problem was causing only the regular weight of Georgia to not embed into the PDF properly.

We will create a new PDF of the April issue that solves this problem, though it may be a few days before it is available for download. In the meantime, there are several ways to read the magazine without having this problem. First, make sure you have the Georgia font installed and that Advanced | Use Local Fonts is checked in Adobe Reader. Second, use FoxIt Reader to read the magazine as it substitutes a font that is much more readable for Georgia.

Now for the solution that we'll have to implement when we re-publish the issue. It seems the problem is a fairly obscure setting in Corel products. No, Corel didn't do anything wrong, it is just a setting that needs to be changed to avoid this issue. On the Objects tab of the Publish to PDF Settings dialog box, the default setting is to Convert TrueType to Type 1 fonts. Georgia is a TrueType font. When this setting is unchecked, the problem goes away.

You can't believe how glad I am to discover the solution to this problem. It took discussions with experts in a wide variety of software to stumble upon the problem. While many users would have called this a bug, it was truly user error all along.

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PDF is Now an ISO Standard

At this point almost every computer user on the planet knows about the PDF (Portable Document Format) file format. It was created and maintained by Adobe until this point. For CorelDRAW users, this has created some frustration as the file format would get updated and we would have to wait for new import/export filters to support the latest format.

Things are changing and this could help keep all software current with the latest format. The ISO (International Organization for Standardisation) has approved the PDF file format as an international document format standard. This means that Adobe no longer has complete control over the format. Instead there will be a ISO committee that determines any changes. Of course, Adobe will participate in the committee and we can only hope other software companies are also represented on that same committee.

Only time will tell, but I think this is a very good thing.

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