Posts Tagged ‘pdf files’
In my last post we had a look at how to deal with text files, probably the most basic types of files, with the story “Tobermory” downloaded from the Gutenberg site.
At the end I referred to the PDF file and many, many ebooks or electronic books created sometimes for commercial purposes or informational purposes are provided as PDF files.
PDF simply means Portable Document Format and it was created by the company Adobe – most famous for the Photoshop programme.
The resulting files are small and can combine text and graphics in a convenient format.
Many sites will tell you to read them using the Adobe Acrobat Reader.
First of all I want to be quite clear that this site Freebooks Plus is about promoting free online books, free off line books and free audio books. It’s not about attacking commercial companies.
Many commercial companies such as Adobe provide free resources of excellent quality.
My difficulty with the Adobe Acrobat reader is that it’s a very large download, it gets updated frequently with even more features that are not always useful for our purposes and there’s some danger of it taking over your browser and your PDF files unless your careful with it.
But by all means if you want to get a completely free and totally reliable PDF reader, Adobe’s Acrobat Reader is perfectly good.
However readers of Freebooks Plus might like to consider other options.
You might like to support the Open Source Software movement, or perhaps just want to have much smaller downloads which use fewer resources.
So, if you go to my resource page you can see a list of several alternative PDF readers.
One of the most important points from where I am is if there is a portable version. By portable here I mean, a version of the software that can be carried around on a pen drive often called a memory stick or a USB flash drive.
The reason for this is that if you travel a lot you can take most of your software with you. You can plug into the USB port of any computer in the world and you can quickly use you programmes without leaving any files or information on the host computer.
Pen drives and alternatives such as flash memory cards are getting larger in capacity but it still makes sense to have the smallest programmes available, both to download and to store.
I suggest going to the resources page and trying out the different PDF readers to see which one suits you best.
One more point perhaps is that all these readers do a good job of reading PDF files but not all give you any option for writing onto PDF files.
This is not strictly necessary for reading freebooks but it might be a factor for you.
From the portability point of view I favour the Sumatra and Foxit readers as they are small and seem stable.
The Sumatra Reader is an Open Source product which means that it isn’t a cut down version of a commercial product and it should work across several operating systems.
So let’s choose a PDF reader and then get ready to obtain, prepare and print a free book in the PDF format.
One final point, this blog is all about legal free books.
I can’t stress that enough.
Some PDF book creators may have decided to block facilities such as copying the contents or printing it.
I suggest we respect the authors rights and concentrate on freebooks that don’t have too many restrictions.
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Until next time….
