Uninterrupted PDF Printing

Adobe Reader is not a friendly program for command line printing. It opens a window and doesn't always shut down gracefully.

There are a couple of candidates for less obtrusive PDF printing:

• PDF Multi Print for silent printing of PDF files (no pop-up or dialog boxes). Graphical Interface, Hot Folder Mode (watched folders) and Command Line supported. Batch Print hundreds of even thousands of PDF files without interruption.
  
  
  Setting up Hot Folder Mode.
  
  Acrobotics download page
  
  
  Either Adobe Reader 4.x - 8.x or the full version of Adobe Acrobat 4.x - 8.x is required.
  
  Price $95 per seat - discounts available for bulk.
  
  
• Adobe Acrobat 9.0 ActiveX appears to allow programatic silent printing
  
  
  
  See the Acrobat.AcroAVDocClass.PrintPagesSilent method
  
  

FreeMind - free mind mapping software

Organise your ideas graphically - http://freemind.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

Pretty easy to use - Export to PDF was the most useful to me.

An interesting browser based (Java Applet) read-only example here.

Multi-Language application

http://www.bullzip.com/files/Translations.zip contains translations of UI prompts in the BullZip PDF Printer. It might be a useful basis when developing a client side applications.

FREE PDF Printer

The BullZip PDF Printer works as a Microsoft Windows printer and allows you to write PDF documents from virtually any Microsoft Windows application.

This program is FREEWARE with limitations, which means that it is FREE for personal and commercial use up to 10 users. It does not contain any advertising or popups. For commercial applications with more that 10 users there is a commercial version of the product available at www.biopdf.com.

See http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php

It uses GNU Ghostscript (as opposed to the original [not commercially free] Ghostscript used in PDFCreator).

There is a (multi-lingual) setup program that allows the user to set defaults.

Default setups appear to be available via COM based API.

All fonts appear to be embedded as subsets.

See http://www.biopdf.com/guide/index.php for more complete documentation.

Unit tests for client side JavaScript

There is an increased use Ajax/JavaScript in client applications. There are a number of Open Source products to assist developers manage change by developing unit tests.

• http://jsunit.net/
• http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/programming-and-development/?p=714&tag=nl.e055

HTML Cleanup

TidyUI is a very handy program to remove the class=”MSONormal” etc tags from a word document saved as HTML.

• http://users.rcn.com/creitzel/tidy.html#tidyui

This makes it very usable if you want to have the convenience of writing something in MS Word (lookup, spell check etc) but you want the HTML in a static WWW page.

WordCleaner

• http://textism.com/wordcleaner/ is also a useful online tool for files < 20Kb

Welcome

This blog contains technical ideas.