I’ve been working with computers, Mac and PC, for many years, using them for making journals among other things, using graphic, photo and layout applications primarily. This blog though is dealing with beekeeping issues and normally nothing else. But I’ll make an exception this time.
I and a former colleague with my former employer have made a revision of a book of 350 pages in Swedish about beekeeping, Boken om biodling (The Book about Beekeeping). I helped trying to fix a proper way of updating the pdf printing file for the book.
The original layout file was made with Adobes InDesign. But that file wasn’t available. Only the pdf printing file. We thought that Adobes application Acrobat would do the job.
Some of the fonts in the pdf-file were present in our computers, some were not. Acrobat reflow the text in several places even with the fonts present in the computer, making the text longer. This would make the job unnecessarily laborious. And the fonts not present on the computer made the problem still worse.
I began searching for alternatives and found some, mostly for Windows but also for Mac. Everyone of them had drawbacks when it came to editing the text and/or changing pictures or pricing. It’s common today with pdf type of files. And from time to time it will be a need for small or bigger changes in such a file. I want to give a good alternative. It’s not free, but it’s the best I’ve tried for editing pdf-files, taken in account the different pro and cons.
This application does the job easily, Infix Pro (http://www.iceni.com/). Works with both Mac and PC. It’s like working in a layout application.. Even if the font isn’t on the computer Infix does the job nicely anyway. If you want to replace an inbedded font which is not present on the computer to one that is, it’s easily done, on all places in the document at the same time.
You easily connect text on different pages which all belongs to the same article. This makes the text reflow nicely when needed. You can easily replace or place new pictures. And Iceni has a very good support team which helps you quick eough when you need help.