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Acrobat

How effective and safe is Preview’s redaction tool?

Preview now offers a tool to redact content from PDF documents. It’s simple to use, but is it safe, or could it lead to disclosure of sensitive information?

December 11, 2020 General, Language, Macs, Technology

File Integrity 7 : Which other file formats are resilient?

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Looks at plain text, CSV, XML, JSON, RTF, RTFD, .docx, .xlsx, and PDF. Which should you trust with your important documents in archives?

April 22, 2020 Macs, Technology

PDF without Adobe 25: If at first you don’t succeed, try OCRing again

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This PDF contained 161 scanned pages from a book, but not one word could be accessed as text, despite using OCR on them. What can you do?

July 2, 2019 General, Language, Macs, Technology

PDF without Adobe 24: Accessibility with PDF/UA

A great idea: tag blocks of text in a PDF and build them into reading order, so that they can be read out loud. How well does that work, then?

June 26, 2019 General, Macs, Technology

28 years after Unicode, we still can’t handle accents: PDF + macOS + URL = chaos

Open a PDF document, select a URL within it and Copy. Then paste it into a webpage for publication. Simple – but the URL then broke. Why?

June 20, 2019 General, Language, Macs, Technology

PDF without Adobe: 23 The nightmare of forms

Just fill in this form – then the problems start. They look fine in Preview or another app, but don’t work right. Here’s why.

June 18, 2019 General, Macs, Technology

PDF without Adobe: 22 The fractious PDF

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Searching this PDF using Preview is hopeless. Is it a bug in Preview or macOS? How can you get proper access to its contents?

June 11, 2019 General, Language, Macs, Technology

PDF without Adobe: 21 PDF Annotations

One of the more confusing features of PDF apps, as none seems to work quite the same, and removing them isn’t quick or simple.

May 2, 2019 General, Language, Macs, Technology

Last Week on My Mac: Taking text further

The Books app demonstrates how stultified is the approach to text on computers. It’s carefully engineered to work like a book, not to bring any new powers to text or reading.

April 28, 2019 General, Language, Macs, Technology

PDF without Adobe: 20 Outlines, Bookmarks and Preview

Tables of Contents, Outline, Bookmarks: what’s the difference, and how portable are they in PDF?

April 23, 2019 General, Language, Macs, Technology

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