Able2Extract Professional 11 Slings PDF Files Around Like a Boss

Product: Able2Extract Professional 11
Price: $149.99

Icon

Able2Extract Professional 11 is a unique product. It works with PDF files. It creates them. It converts them. It edits them and lets you control your PDF workflow with ease.

Admittedly a niche product, it is an useful tool if you are dealing with an influx of PDF files which you need to work with.

Conversions

For instance, if you have a PDF file which was generated by AutoCAD and you need to convert it into an AutoCad file, Able2Extract Professional 11 is the solution to your problem. It does less esoteric conversions too. You can convert to Excel, Word, Powerpoint, HTML, CSV, and the aforementioned AutoCAD.

It does conversions well. Or at least, as well as can be expected. The product is not perfect, some of the conversions seem like voodoo and the results are perfect. Some of them need work, but I think the activity of converting the PDF file to any other format is bound to be a little bit of a hair-tearing out experience. And the product doesn’t disappoint. It does some conversions beautifully and some of them were not ideal. You can help that process along and it requires some tinkering but I must admit that the act of taking a PDF of a spreadsheet and turning it into a CSV file is enough voodoo for me. I was impressed with the results of that exercise.

Scanned Image PDF Conversion

Sometimes you run into documents which have been scanned into the PDF format. By definition, these are more difficult to convert to anything usable. It is a good record to have but the documents themselves are not malleable. Able2Extract Professional 11 through its OCR engine is able to convert these kind of documents into workable formats which is voodoo of the highest order. Again, the process is easy, but the results vary and some of the results will leave you elated and some of them will be a tad frustrating.

Edit PDF Files Like a Boss

Able2Extract Professional 11 gives you powerful edit tools to work on a PDF file. You get to modify the contents and also split or merge PDF documents. You can edit the text and make general changes to PDF files.

Annotations

The application gives you a comprehensive collection of annotation tools, including sticky notes, links, highlights and watermarks.

Create PDF Files With Ease

The application lets you create PDF documents from any application. It has security features and file customizations which give you complete control over the rendered output.

The Interface

a2ep Interface

Able2Extract Professional 11 is not pretty. I am not sure it is trying to be. It is a product which is directed towards the business professional who needs to be able to work with PDF files. The interface is functional. It leads you through the tasks that you want to perform and it does it well.

Conclusion

Able2Extract Professional 11 is a professional tool directed towards a particular audience. If you need to handle PDF file creation, editing and conversions, it is a great tool to have in your toolset. It is efficient software geared towards fulfilling your need to conquer PDF files.

Able2Extract Professional 11 is highly recommended.

Update: A time limited license was provided by the developer looking for a review.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Five Finder Tips

Finder Icon

The Path Bar Is Versatile

Path Bar

In the Finder, you turn on the Path Bar by choosing Show Path Bar from the View menu. Or press, ⌥ + ⌘ + P.

Path Bar 2

You get the path of the selected file/folder at the bottom of the Finder. You can click on any part of the path to switch to it. You can right click on any folder and choose to open it in a new tab. You can drop files/folders on any part of the path to move them there. Makes navigating up and down the file hierarchy easy.

Tabs or Windows

Finder Tabs or Windows

You can choose whether new Finder windows open in a new tab or in a new window. In Finder Preferences (⌘+, in the Finder). In the General tab, at the bottom is the choice of tabs or windows. Select this if you want tabs. Deselect for windows. If you are not accustomed to tabs, please try them. You might like them.

Where am I?

Command Click Title

You can hold down the ⌘ key and click on the title of a Finder window. You are going to get a drop down menu showing the folder hierarchy. You can select any parent directory to switch to it. Another way to traverse the directory tree.

Use Auto-Complete to Fill in Folder Names

Auto-Complete Go To

To switch to a different directory in the Finder, type ⇧ + ⌘ + G, in the resultant dialog box, start typing the name of the folder, the Finder will help you by auto completing it, hit tab and move on to typing the sub folder. Remember the shortcut for your home folder is ~.

Copy Path to Clipboard

In the Finder, select a file or folder, press ⌥ + ⌘ + C to copy the full path to the Clipboard. This is useful to work with directories in the Terminal. Remember to escape the spaces in your directory names with the  key.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Hemingway Now Writes and Edits

Hemingway icon

Product: The Hemingway Editor Desktop Application
Price: $19.99

I am trying to be a better writer. That quest to be a better writer takes me to the Hemingway Editor application. There is a web app. I prefer the desktop application and it has a new upgrade to version 3.0.

The Hemingway app aims to improve your writing style. It provides a Readability score. It analyses the structure and content of your sentences. It highlights passive voice, the adverbs, and phrases which have simpler alternatives. It also highlights sentences which are hard or very hard to read.

I use it along with iA Writer’s Syntax Control when I am editing to improve the flow and readability of my writing.

Write Stage

The Hemingway Desktop Application now has two distinct stages. One is the Write stage. Gives you a minimalistic window to input text. Supports the following format elements:

1. Headings (three levels)
2. Bold and italic
3. Quotes and Links
4. List both bulleted and numbered

Hemingway Write Stage

I am surprised at the lack of explicit keyboard commands for the formatting commands. There are buttons at the top of the document to help you format your document. I don’t mind the buttons, but I want keyboard commands. Some of the keyboard commands do exist but they are not documented.  ⌘B for bold and ⌘I for italic works. ⌘K works for inserting a link. There are no keyboard commands for bulleted or numbered lists. But you can outdent a bulleted paragraph (⌘[) or indent a bulleted paragraph (⌘]). 

There are some keyboard commands to manipulate the environment. ⌘J to toggle between Write and Edit Mode. ⌘L to toggle on/off the right sidebar.

The full screen mode is usable and it is not a bad environment to work in. 

Edit Stage

Hemingway Edit Stage

After you finish writing you move on to the Edit stage. The edit stage gives you a nice colorful overview of how your document is doing. It gives you suggestions to improve the style of your content. 

It is a great way of improving the readability of your writing.

General Comments

Hemingway imports plain text files (.txt), Markdown files (.md), Web pages (.html) or Word documents. It lets you export your writing to the same formats. Additionally you can export to pdf files and even Hemingway highlighted pdf files.

This ability to export Hemingway highlighted pdf files makes the product useful to give feedback to your co-writers.

Improvements

These are the specific improvements I would like:

1. More keyboard commands.
2. Support Markdown. Let me write markdown tables and footnotes.
3. Typewriter scrolling in full screen mode.

Conclusions

Hemingway app is another tool in my arsenal. I use it to improve as a writer. It might help you too. I recommend it.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

icon

iA Writer Keyboard Commands

I didn’t find a comprehensive list of keyboard commands for iA Writer. So, I made one.

Emacs keyboard commands which work in iA Writer

Additions Made Through KeyboardMaestro

There were some menu items which I thought would be improved by adding keyboard commands to them. I used KeyboardMaestro to add them to iA Writer.

Table of Contents

macosxguru at the gmail thingie

Gerald Durrell, His Family and Other Animals

“My Family and Other Animals.” That was the title of the book sitting on the counter. Made me smile. I can honestly say I picked up the book simply because I liked the title.

It was 1975. I was 14 years old, living in Calcutta. I didn’t have access to a library or enough money. So access to books was limited. I had an aunt who read, but she was kind of mean, not the sharing type. She was rich and had books but she never let me borrow them. Could have had something to do with her lipsticks.

If you twist a lipstick open and then close the lid on it, it gets stuck and messy. When you yank open the lid the lipstick opens with a plop sound. It doesn’t really work as a lipstick at that point, but I had no need for lipsticks and I loved that sound. Four year old me tried to repeat that sound with all of her lipsticks. She never shared her books with me. I can’t blame her. Anyone who has such an irrational love of the plop sound surely can’t be trusted to take care of books.

No library and not enough money meant that my source of books was a rental bookstore. The older me realizes that this enterprise was definitely illegal. They would buy books, reinforce the binding and rent them out. A book in India at that time could cost about 20 rupees. But you could rent a newly released book for two days for 2.50 rupees (additional days required .50 rupees each). Older books were cheaper and you could keep them longer. The selection was predominantly fiction. There were different categories of books, the Robert Ludlum was expensive, the Mills and Boon was not. My mother and I were good customers of this shop in the neighborhood. It was illegal because you are not supposed to make money renting out a book. It is a violation of the copyright laws, but those things were unknown and didn’t mean much to a person who was just looking to read some books.

Cover

That bookstore is where I found the book “My Family and Other Animals.” It was written by a guy called Gerald Durrell, I didn’t know anything about him. But the title got me. I took it home.

Evenings consisted of homework and then reading whatever book was available. Black and white TV was available in India at that point, but my family couldn’t afford a TV set. You don’t miss what you don’t know about, so I didn’t miss TV. I loved my books. Gerald Durrell transported me into the world of Corfu. I didn’t know where that was. A look at the atlas and I found out that it was a Greek island. I didn’t know much about the Greeks either, but I had heard of Plato and Aristotle. This was bound to be eye-opening.

I loved the characters. I loved the eccentricities of the British. No one does eccentric like the British. I laughed. I cried. I learned about exotic insects. It was an enthralling experience. I devoured the next book in the series, “Birds, Beasts, and Relatives.”

I introduced my mean aunt to the books. She reciprocated by actually letting me borrow a book by James Herriot. I am going to talk about him and his books in a later post.

I find that the Corfu books are a trilogy. They are available at Amazon, here.

If you want, you can catch the stories in the TV series, The Durrell’s in Corfu. The complete first season is available here.

I prefer the books but you can’t go wrong with either.

As you can tell by now, I heartily recommend them.

macosxguru at the gmail thingie