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Wednesday, July 02, 2008 3:10 PM PDT

Tips for Working Online with the New Standard, PDF

As the IDG News Service reports, the International Organization for Standardization is now in charge of Adobe's Portable Document Format as an international standard. To mark the occasion, here's a collection of tips and tools for working with the ubiquitous files.

First, and most important, if you use Adobe Reader make sure you keep it up-to-date. The most recent security flaw in the program allows an attacker to take over your PC if you open a poisoned PDF, and it was actively exploited before a patch even came out. Take a look at the Secunia advisory for more info and links to Reader updates.

Next up - if you don't like Reader for whatever reason (maybe you want to avoid security flaws like the one listed above) the free Foxit Reader does a good job displaying PDFs. Foxit isn't immune to security flaws by any means, but its holes won't be targeted nearly as often as those in the much more widely used Adobe products. Grab it from http://www.foxitsoftware.com/.  

For sharing and storing your many PDFs, you can now use Google Docs. It's a good way to provide many different people access to your file without a huge e-mail blast, and you get a de facto backup to boot, but there are limitations such as not being able to copy text or edit files.  More from this previous post.

Finally, if you ever want to preserve a snapshot of a Web page as a downloadable PDF, a free online utility at Htm2pdf.co.uk can take care of it for you.  More here.

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