Pdf News & Articles

For enterprises that border on the complacent when it comes to security, the latest report from IBM (news, site) which shows document format vulnerabilities and related attacks are soaring --  particularly with PDFs -- might act as a wake-up call.

Nuance (news, site) offers up a new document reader that can turn PDFs into Office documents.

Following the release of a new PDF management suite earlier this month, Litéra (news, site) has announced that it has signed a final agreement to buy document creation and automation provider SoftWise Corporation.

Like most of these deals the price that the North Carolina-based document content lifecycle management company paid has not been released, but the deal will see Litéra add feature-rich document creation, template management and numbering to some of the components in its DCLM suite.

The deal means that Litéra’s DCLM software suite now enables users to create, collaborate, compare and cleanse documents as they move through the document lifecycle.

Litéra, which works principally with corporations and law firms, says the acquisition was prompted by the need to provide standardized document creation and process automation using a single interface.

Both companies have assured existing SoftWise clients that they will continue to get software support from the company with the deal including a move by Bill Robertson, president and founder of SoftWise, to Litera as Vice President of Client Development.

Explaining the decision to move in with Literal, Robertson said that after the two companies co-developed the Metadact software, a security product that reduces the risk of unintentional disclosure of confidential information embedded in Microsoft Office, the move “was the right move for our company and customers . . “

The list of applications that SoftWise brought with the deal will definitely be beneficial to Litera as well as complementing the DCLM suite.

Lifecycles. They exist in just about every form, from humans to honeybees. But forget biology, let’s talk about the lifecycle of your documents.

That’s right. Everyday you create a new document, review and format it just the way you want. Then you save it as a PDF to give it that clean, polished look. But the lifecycle of the document rarely ends there. There are always revisions and edits, forcing you back into the original document to spend your valuable time fixing margins and tampering with page numbers, just to save it as a PDF again.

Consequently, very few of us would consider a PDF a working document. Until now.

In what is being described as the deepest integration with Autonomy’s (news, site) iManage document management software to date, Australian-based DocsCorp (news, site ) has announced upgrades to both its pdfDocs Desktop and pdfDocs compareDocs so that the two can be integrated into iManage out-of-the-box and without any special connectors.

Specifically targeting legal, financial and government agencies, the new integration gives users of iManage a whole pile of new PDF management features from pdfDocs Desktop including editing, file splitting, annotation and stamping.

Document management software provider eCopy has announced eCopy PaperWorks Plus. This product allows users to convert paper documents into electronic Portable Document Format (PDF) files that can be edited, searched, managed and organized. There are also some additions that make this application better suited for users looking to improve their workflows.

What is a major problem when trying to rope data into a content management system? Trying to contain, organize and aggregate unstructured and non-standardized data is likely one of the issues on the top of any content manager’s list.

This is why RSD has announced a new product called Data2Doc that aims to bring some structure and standardization to PDF documents and other data sources. The new offering will enable customers to quickly deliver business-critical, data-rich documents quickly and easily.

Think of it this way: if Google Maps and Flickr “knew” each other in the Biblical sense (as far as apps can, anyway), this is what their baby would be like.

For dedicated content builders who’ve always wanted to compare the kettle to the pot, Sydney-based DocsCorp releases compareDocs, an enhancement to the pdfDocs Solutions Suite.

If you are looking for an alternative to Adobe Acrobat for PDF creation and manipulation, look no further. Nitro PDF Software follows up the March release of Nitro PDF Express with the release of a new version of Nitro PDF Professional.

California-based Nitro PDF Software, the PDF tool vendor, has announced the release of Nitro PDF Express. A bargain basement deal that put some nifty PDF tools at your fingertips for less than US$ 50.

The software unleashes a new set of PDF tools including utilities for creation, conversion, extraction, file combination, file splitting, batch processing, and PDF security. Users can now create PDFs quickly and easily from over 200 different file types, and will have complete control over the documents’ security.

Considering its notable release of Acrobat 8 just months ago, and withstanding some recent criticisms we’ve published, it’s clear Adobe is not shy about raising the bar for the next generation of document collaboration and security software.

So it comes as little surprise that this year Adobe plans to drive towards ISO standardization of its PDF specification. According to Adobe Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch, this means PDF will evolve from de facto security standard to de jure. As, he doesn’t hesitate to add, “it should.”

PowerPoints are the curse of the intranet, and PDFs the curse of the Web. PDFs reflect print thinking. On the Web, we need web thinking.