Steve Deakin's Weblog

This is very cool software for Microsoft Windows that allows you to create, edit, and publish PDF files without the need for the expensive Adobe Acrobat which is priced for high usage professional and not for occasional user.

I’ve found the software ideal for filling out official forms and also reformatted PDF documents ready to read on my Sony Reader.

All the usual composition features are present including printing to PDF, signing, stamping, adding bates numbers for legal documents and document security. In addition the PDF-to-Word conversion is one of the best on the market for retrieving text from a PDF document in a form that is high-fidelity from the original (document security permissions permitting)

There is a download for free trial version that works for 14 days.

Nitro PDF Professional 6.0 – Free Download

I use Windows and Linux interchagably so I like to choose open source toolsets that run on both platforms (I also find that Linux apps are generally also available on Mac OS X so that’s cool).

Miro is now my favourite video player (Xine has been deprecated in my A-List).

It supports all the video formats I use (Flash Video, AVI, H.264, Windows Media, Quicktime and MPEG), searches YouTube and Google Video, and allows downloads.

The only downside is the arms race between Miro and YouTube for enabling and disabling the download facility respectively but that is OK if you keep your version of Miro up to date.

You can get Miro here: Get Miro