metaViper

If you work with PDF documents regularly then maybe you’re already aware of batches in Acrobat and what a life-saver they can be. I’d like to take that a step in a different direction and enable PDF manipulation directly from Windows Explorer.

PDF-ShellTools does just that, it adds a section to your right click menu in Windows Explorer with a lot of functionality. I use it to set open options for lots of PDFs at once without opening Acrobat. It’s also been very helpful in adding or viewing metadata. Did I mention it’s free?

Here are a list of features copied from their site:

• PDF-Anonymize - Remove all the metadata traces from the PDF files.
• PDF-Split/Extract - Extract pages, or range of pages, into new PDF documents.
• PDF-Merge/Rearrange - Merge several PDF documents, or rearrange source file pages structure, into a new PDF document.
• PDF-Insert/Append - Insert one, or more, documents pages after, or before, a specified page number of another PDF document.
• PDF-Attachments - Add, remove, consult and extract PDF file attachments.
• PDF-Set Open Options - Configure the initial view of PDF documents. Can set, full screen mode, initial page, initial magnification, layout, page mode, etc.
• PDF-Set/Reset Password Security - Control the access to the PDF documents contents using password protection.
• PDF-Stamp/Watermark - Stamp text, images and shapes into PDF documents pages.
• PDF-Extract Text Content - Extract the PDF documents text content into text files.
• PDF-Renamer - Rename, and organize by folders, the PDF documents using its metadata information as source to compose the file name or folder structure.

At some point every business needs to gather information from its customers or employees by asking them to fill out a form. Whether it’s a sign-up form for benefits or a survey on the latest business expo, that information can be critical in making decisions that align with strategic goals.

But there’s a problem. The company that created Acrobat and the PDF standard, Adobe, restricts who is able to save form data when using the free Acrobat Reader. As a compromise, the 8.0 release of Acrobat Professional provides an option for allowing Acrobat Reader users to save form data. However, the terms of use restrict this functionality to 500 users. It’s unclear whether that means 500 users per license of Acrobat Professional or if that means a 500 person limit for each form created. Still, for smaller data gathering this is a good solution if you want to buy or upgrade to Acrobat Professional 8.

A free solution is to use PDFescape, a product by CTdeveloping. To use PDFescape (1) upload a PDF file, (2) insert their generated JavaScript code into your web page. They also offer a more powerful solution that enables features like adding hyperlinks, and installation on your own server.