As you have all been busy, so have I. But now I am well fed, and my kids are happy with their new toys. My son was disappointed that the Tracphone Web site was unable to keep up with all the traffic. My son was not able to register his new phone and card minutes. Oh well, technology definitely has its limits.

One limit I would like to relieve for you is the creation of cross platform communication. I currently have been using the free version of PrimoPDF as a printer driver, but it has a tendency to crash Mozilla Firefox, so I could not save Web sites as PDF documents like I am used to in Avant or Opera. This appears to be a problem with the default resolution of Primo PDF being 3600 DPI. Avant, Opera 8.x or 9.0x all work flawlessly, but Firefox 1.5x and 2.0x crash consistently unless I click through all the preferences buttons for each and every print and reduce the printer driver resolution to 300 DPI. You can imagine this is such a royal pain that I stopped long ago, and yes I have reported this several times to the bug lists for Mozilla.
But I just recently learned from Digg about PDF Creator, an Open Source Windows printer driver and app based on GhostScript.
The NewsForge article is located at this link.

The official Web site for PDF Creator is here.
The advantage of PDF Creator over Primo PDF is that you can save the print as Encapsulated Postscript, as well as PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, and PCX.
So I will be switching from Primo PDF print drivers to this print driver, hopefully when I encounter Web sites that do not want to play nice with high resolution printers, especially with frames, they have one or more pages for the side frame, and one or more pages for the actual content that I am looking at in the middle.

If you are not tied to Adobe Acrobat, then I highly recommend this solution to create PDF documents from any application.

Just do me a favor and for goodness’ sake do not use this as a tool to publish Web pages since there is no possibility of linking inside the PDF document, and the community is beginning to rise up in protest over the use of PDF pages instead of HTML. The Digg community even goes so far as to place (warning PDF) next to a link if there is a PDF page that is about to be displayed. I personally have no issue with PDF pages - although they are slower than most straight HTML pages I have learned to deal. That is why I have tabbed browsing.

I have just been told that the tags that are located on this blog are in the wrong place so I will slowly be changing the tags to be located at the bottom of the entries. Other problems I encounter with my minimal knowledge of blogging include no tools to embed the HTML links, and formatting. I will try to get better, but since I am an old dog (51) don’t expect the change to be very fast. Formatting appears to be an issue as well since I am used to using Return to indicate where I want the end of the line but this WordPress puts in really ugly spacing; eventually I will get the hang of it all.

[tags]microface, Open Source, PDF[/tags]