Utilities do many things, but they exist for one simple reason: they let us prevail over the limitations inherent in Windows and common productivity apps.
Here are four small apps that can reduce work time and save money spent on paper and ink.
FinePrint and pdfFactory save time and money
It started with a simple task: I just wanted to print selected pages in a PDF document. I could go through the tedious process of entering page numbers in the print dialog box, but I thought there must be an easier and quicker way. I wasn’t even all that concerned about saving paper and ink. I soon ran across FinePrint (U.S. $50, trial; more info), a powerful utility that lets me do much more than simply select pages to print — and save on printing costs.
FinePrint 8.0 operates as a virtual printer. Once installed, it shows up in the print dialog box’s list of available printers. Send a print job to FinePrint, and your document is displayed within a FinePrint window. You can view it page by page or as a collection of thumbnails. You can make changes to the document — select pages to print, change document styling, and so forth — before sending the now-customized print job to the physical printer.
Unlike Windows’ passive print-preview function, FinePrint’s preview includes a toolbar of pre-printing options, including color/grayscale printing, removing graphics, adding text notes, and more.
Figure 1. FinePrint's various options for changing how a document is printed
You can also quickly select the number of document pages to be printed on one sheet of paper. That came in handy when printing four pages of a 20-page, PDF-based, camera instruction manual on one letter-sized sheet. This saved considerable time, paper, and ink. Printing the document in grayscale would also have used less overpriced color ink on my ink jet printer.
The program’s Letterhead function lets you create custom letterheads on the fly. Simply create a document containing only the letterhead you want saved. Next, “print” to FinePrint, select Letterhead from FinePrint’s Settings menu, and give your new FinePrint-based letterhead a descriptive name. You can easily save various letterheads and quickly choose the one you need for a specific print job. (Note: The Letterhead tool will remain checked unless you deselect it.)
A Notes function can save often-used graphics and text strings, dates, signatures, and initials — convenient when you’re filling out forms or adding a digital signature.
Figure 2. The useful FinePrint Notes function saves your frequently used document elements.
Although the concept of FinePrint is relatively simple, its range of tools can be somewhat confusing at first. But the company offers clear, online tutorials and video instructions that will reduce the initial learning curve. (There’s no local help built into the program, and — ironically — the online documentation isn’t especially easy to print.)
FinePrint seems a bit pricey and has an odd collection of powerful tools and limitations. For example, I could find no menu command for rotating images (some of which were displayed sideways) in the preview window, and the only two preview zoom levels I saw were one page at a time or unreadable thumbnails. Still, it provides more control and faster selection of what actually gets printed. Use it frequently, and you’ll soon recover your $50 investment.
I recommend downloading and running FinePrint in its free-trial mode. It’s fully functional, but your print jobs will all include the footer: “Printed with FinePrint trial version ….”
A less-expensive PDF creator: As everyone who uses a computer knows, PDFs (portable document format) let you create and share documents that are independent of the original application, hardware, and operating system — all while maintaining fonts, layout, and graphics. Developed by Adobe Systems, the PDF format became an open standard around 2008, when a slew of third-party PDF-reading and -creating applications appeared.
Adobe’s free Reader might seem like the default PDF viewer, but that’s simply because it’s often preloaded on new PCs. Competition forced Adobe to add more editing capabilities into what had been a simple PDF viewer (but still no threat to the $254-plus Adobe Acrobat.) Some of those new Reader options send users to Adobe’s website, where you must pay a fee to actually use the features.
Most PC users don’t need the power of Acrobat but still need some PDF-creation and manipulation capabilities. That leaves a nice market for free and inexpensive products such as Foxit (site), Nitro Reader (see below), and — from the same folks that bring you the aforementioned FinePrint — pdfFactory (more info).
Operationally, pdfFactory and FinePrint are near-twins. In fact, if you have both apps installed, pdfFactory’s icon is added to FinePrint’s toolbar. Like FinePrint, pdfFactory is a virtual printer; sending a document to it instead of to your hardware-based printer launches the PDF-creation process.
Among the utility’s various talents is the ability to combine multiple, printable documents into a single PDF — no matter how they were originally created. Again, you simply print them to pdfFactory.
The utility can also make quick work of rearranging a document. For example, I wanted to change the order of pages in a Word document. Accomplishing that in Word could require some time-consuming cutting and pasting and, probably, painful formatting issues. Using pdfFactory’s thumbnail view, I just reordered the pages the way I wanted them in the final PDF. I could also remove unwanted pages with the app’s insertion/deletion function.
The utility supports MAPI-compatible email clients such Outlook, Eudora, and Thunderbird — simply click the email icon to send your document as a PDF attachment. Since I don’t have a MAPI-compatible email client, I just pasted the whole shebang into an outgoing message.
Filling in PDF-based forms such as the IRS W-9 Taxpayer ID (a common task for contractors and freelancers) required no handwriting and faxing. I filled it in with pdfFactory’s edit function. My digital signature could also be inserted via its Notes tool. Notes content can be text, images, and even full document boilerplates.
The company boasts that you can drag-and-drop PDFs into Evernote and cloud-based services such as Gmail. But I found no way to do that, and the help tutorials don’t appear to address it.
As with FinePrint, pdfFactory can be downloaded and run as a free trial, but with a company footer inserted on each page. Otherwise, it’s $50, but you can buy both products together for $65.
Other PDF services — free and cloud-based
Nitro Software, the makers of the popular Nitro Pro, has been busy upgrading its product. I reviewed the free Nitro Reader and the paid Nitro Pro 8.4 in the May 2 Best Software column. Just six months later, the company released Nitro Pro 9.0 — along with an independent, free/subscription, cloud-based, document-conversion service, Nitro Cloud (info). You don’t need to download software or even own Nitro Pro; the service lets you create PDFs, convert PDFs to Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents, sign PDF forms, and collaborate online. The free account gets you five document conversions a month. A premium, $21-per-month subscription offers unlimited conversions.
PlotSoft.com’s free PDFill (info) tools were recommended by a Windows Secrets reader. The app includes 15 PDF-editing functions such as file merge, split/reorder pages, convert to images, and so forth. But for more extensive editing, you need to buy the $20 PDFill PDF Editor.
The download process actually installs three separate but related applications: the free PDF and Image Writer (a PDF creation program), PDFill Tools (with the 15 features), and a trial version of PDF Editor 11, which lets you fill in PDF forms such as those from the IRS. The company claims to include no watermarks or ads with its two free apps.
The Tools window (see Figure 3) is self-explanatory, and each button-click leads to an equally straightforward screen that offers step-by-step instructions. For example, to convert a PDF into an image file, click button 10; a window opens with everything you need to save the PDF as a common image format.
Figure 3. The PDFill Tools window
The 15 features of PDFill Tools let you work with an existing PDF file. To create a PDF, you must use the Writer app (see Figure 4). It works on the same principle as pdfFactory — you send the document to Writer as a print job from any application or screen. You then save the file as a new PDF or send it to your physical printer.
Figure 4. Use PDFill PDF Writer to create new PDF documents.
Given its simplicity, clean layout, and robust functions, it’s hard to believe that PDFill Tools are gratis. However, the fact that it’s not a single package does mean taking more steps to complete PDF-creating and -editing tasks. But hey, who can argue with free?
Legal or not, DVD rippers make DVDs from DVDs
Movie companies obviously take piracy of their films exceedingly seriously. So much so that they go to great lengths to prevent PC users from making even a single copy of DVD- or Blu-ray-based films.
The fair-use laws on making personal copies are still somewhat gray. Which means enterprising software companies have, for some time, reverse-engineered DVD encryption so that individuals could duplicate previously locked discs.
This tug-of-war continues, and it can be difficult to tell what’s legitimate and what’s not. For example, China-based Digiarty Software is selling its video manipulation and conversion software, WinX DVD Ripper and WinX HD Video Converter. A few months ago, Digiarty offered to let me review WinX DVD Ripper’s Blu-ray-copying capability. But soon after, Blu-ray ripping vanished from the product, leaving just DVD copying. Possibly, Blu-ray support was dropped due to the more complicated and ever-evolving encryption use for that platform. (Oddly, Digiarty has also been offering limited-time, free, or nearly free product downloads on its site — for reasons that remain obscure.)
In any case, I took WinX DVD Ripper’s DVD-to-iPhone feature for a test spin, using a major studio film. The process is seemingly simple, even if you are not familiar with DVD file structure — specifically titles. Some titles are for special features; others are for the film itself — and there’s no simple way of distinguishing which is which. So, though I had the option of picking titles, I took the easy route and copied everything.
It took 45 minutes to produce and save a copy of a nearly two-hour movie on my PC. The file was .mp4 format, which plays winningly in most digital devices that can play a movie. Other standard file formats such as AVI, MOV, etc. are supported as well. I was then able to stream or upload the file to my iPad — or play it on my PC using common applications such as Windows Media Player, iTunes, and VideoLAN’s free VLC media player.
I leave the moral question to you, but the usually $20 package can theoretically let you view offline on your tablet or phone those DVDs you’ve purchased. Copying that Netflix DVD for purposes of keeping a permanent copy is, however, certainly illegal.