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Showing posts with the label PDF

Visio print to PDF wider than paper choices

I really struggled with this one. I had a Visio diagram (Microsoft Visio Pro 2019) that ran 50 inches by 11 inches, i.e. 3 tabloid pages strung together in landscape. The solution ended up being quite simple. I had a few things set that I don't think matter, but may be helpful to know. The Design was set to Auto Size.  In Page Setup (Design > Size > More Page Sizes), the Page Size was set to let Visio expand (add) pages as needed. With the Page Breaks on (See the View ribbon), it's easy to see where each page begins and ends as you expand pages across and down. The actual steps are as follows: Make sure you can see your entire diagram on the screen. Click File (upper-left). Click Save As from the left navigation. Click Browse from the list to the right of the navigation. This will open a Save As dialog box. Navigate to the place you want to save your file using typical Explore functions. Click the dropdown on " Save as type ." Find and sel...

No available system font when editing a PDF

I recently had to make a minor edit to an old PDF that I no longer had the source for. For large edits, there are PDF to DOC converters, but for minor edits I just use Acrobat. With this particular file I got an unexpected error message. All or part of the selection has no available system font. You cannot add or delete text using the currently selected font. Through a little searching I discovered that by selecting and then right-clicking the text, and entering the Properties dialog, I could change the font being used. In this particular case though, there were no system fonts embedded in the document and the only choices were from the original computer that created it -- a Mac. Since I was using Windows, this failed too. Fortunately for me I have Adobe Illustrator. With Adobe Illustrator you can open individual pages of a PDF and using the text tool you can make changes. If you don't have Acrobat or Illustrator and need to edit a PDF, PDFEscape -- a browser-based applet -- will ...

Portions of a PDF don't print

I recently have had two cases where a portion of a PDF file that I saw on screen didn't print. Both documents had inserted signatures among other things. When I opened the file in Acrobat and Illustrator, I could see there were multiple objects. It was some of the objects that were not printing. I figured I should be able to solve with Illustrator, but never came up with a solution using it. Back in Acrobat, I saved the PDF as a Word document. Then from Word, I created a new PDF. Now my new PDF was complete and it printed everything that I saw on the screen.

Free PDF Hosting

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UPDATE 18-Nov-08: I missed this one; not sure what changed -- Google Docs DOES NOT allow sharing of PDFs. Of course a single user can store and view a PDF; you just cannot share it. "Please note, at this time you can only share PDFs from the Docs list, not the PDF itself. Publishing a PDF so that anyone can view has not yet been implemented." I guess I am back to finding an alternative. I looked into free file hosting, to see if I could find a place to store a few PDFs for this blog. The real need came from my current host, Blogger, not providing this service when I last checked in August. It is free, so I can't really complain, yet it is part of Google that gives me 10 GBs free for using their Gmail and Picasa services -- that are also free. Of course I could use Google Docs, but then that forces me to format my documents to fit their tool. STOP - I spoke too soon, Google Docs now supports PDFs; I can host any PDF up to 10 MB in size (and I can always purchase more ...

Do PDF Better Than Adobe

If you are like me, you get very irritated by the time it takes to open a PDF file. And once open, Adobe is asking you to update to a new version. Worse, if you do not have the original CD (e.g. your IT department installed it), then once all the files are downloaded, the update fails. Oh, and did I mention that Adobe thinks it is okay to run all the time and consume some of your processing power while sending information about you back to them? FoxIt Reader is a great replacement. It's fast, it does not nag me, and I do not have to worry about someone stealing my processing power or my privacy. Do you still need to create PDFs? There is a better solution for that too... Try CutePDF Writer or PDF Creator . Both work like a printer driver, but instead of printing out your document, it prompts you for a file name.