If you have used word processing software such as Microsoft Word long enough, you would probably know by now that all the fancy formatting and styling you have for your document on your computer may look totally horrendous on another machine, especially when viewed with other ‘compatible’ word processing software such as Open Office‘s Writer or other freely available viewers.

To avoid this problem, one easy way is to generate PDFs of your document which you can then distribute which you can be sure they would be able to view it without any issues.

Adobe‘s PDF format is probably the de facto standard when it comes to document viewing. The Adobe Reader software which is used to view PDF files is free and is installed in most computers nowadays. Another free PDF viewer which you can use instead is Foxit Reader.

So now to generating PDFs! Just follow the steps below and you should be able to start generating them real soon:

1. Download PDFCreator from here (get the .msi version, i.e. zPDFCreator-0_9_3-AD_DeploymentPackage-WithoutToolbar.msi).
2. Install PDFCreator by running the .msi file which you downloaded earlier. If you go to ‘Printers and Faxes’, you should see a new ‘PDFCreator’ printer installed.
3. Open your document as usual, get to the print dialog, choose printing preferences and then select the PDFCreator printer.
4. Hit ‘Print’ as usual and you would then be prompted on the filename of the PDF file and where you want to save it to.

With PDFCreator, you can practically generate PDFs from any application which supports printing. There are other settings you can choose from in PDFCreator such as having the PDF encrypted to prevent unauthorised copying.

Another PDF generating software which you can try out instead is CutePDF Writer which does the same thing, but requires you to download and install the Ghostscript converter separately and does not have that many features as compared to PDFCreator.

Check out his blog and his 2 new entries to spherebox over here and here!

Apparently it’s now officially called Firefox 2 and not two-point-o (2.0), so I’ve dropped the .0 from the title. :P

I usually use the shortcut keys ALT+I, ALT+B rather frequently at a forum I visit to get highlighted text in the post box to be italicised or bolded, but in Firefox 2, this shortcut keys no longer work by default. You now have to add the SHIFT key into the mix, so it goes ALT+SHIFT+I instead. If you don’t want to use the SHIFT key, you can edit two values in about:config (like for the close tab button previously):

Change:

ui.key.chromeAccess to 5

ui.key.contentAccess to 4

Taken from MozillaZine forum.

As for other about:config tweaks, head over to this page and for other Firefox tweaks, check this guide out. ;)

I’ve finally decided to switch to Google Reader permanently. I probably have been procrastinating in doing this for a long time since I’ve been using it for quite some time and am rather fond of it. :( Unfortunately, the incessant downtimes and also irregularities in feeds being updated recently was probably the final straw.

Google Reader seems to have fixed the scrolling bug with feeds only having 1 item and also the last item not marked as read which I previously encountered the last time.

Guess it’s pretty hard to compete with Google when the point is on reliability..

CK was telling me that Box.net no longer have free signups, but that wasn’t the case when I tried. And so we both took screenshots..

Accessed from Melbourne, Australia:

{.imagelink}

Accessed from KL, Malaysia:

{.imagelink}

Apparently the signup page differs if you have an IP from Malaysia! I told him to try using ATunnel to verify that, and true enough, he was able to sign up. I guess bandwidth abuse by Malaysians is pretty rife..