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PDFCombo update adds TOC editing and shortcuts

5/15/2014

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PDFCombo app icon
PDFCombo for Mac OS X 10.6+ can combine PDFs while preserving table of contents
PDFCombo version 1.0.3 adds three new features:
  • You can edit the Table of Contents (TOC) entry for the PDF directly in the table's first column. This is especially useful when using the Print dialog in other applications to Print as PDF to PDFCombo, where the PDF filename may be too generic.
  • New option to preserve or discard existing TOC in PDFs, where if you choose to discard existing TOCs, the generated combined PDF will only have top-level TOC entries corresponding to first page of each input PDF.
  • Keyboard shortcuts CMD + S for saving combined PDF to disk, and Option + CMD + S to save to temporary PDF.
PDFCombo is a free app for Mac OS X 10.6 and later, available from the Downloads page, and from the Mac App Store.
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OneNote Mac now works well with PDFoo

5/1/2014

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Microsoft OneNote is a brilliant tool for visual thinkers, with the ability to position notes anywhere on the infinite page. Furthermore, it provides rich organization capabilities with pages arranged in sections and notebooks. And OneNote for Mac seamlessly syncs all your content across Macs and iPads, and is even editable on the web at onenote online.

With today's update to OneNote, it now supports hyperlinks. PDFoo users can now copy from PDF and paste into OneNote to get a working PDFoo URL. Use the layout flexibility in OneNote for Mac to arrange the content in a way that makes sense to you. For example, the screenshot below shows my quick reference guide to best features in Scrivener for Mac. The blue URLs are pdfoo:// URLs and prefix "scrivmanv25" was assigned in PDFoo to the Scrivener 2.5 Letter-sized user manual in PDF format (available from the Scrivener support website).
Scrivener for Mac user manual indexed using PDFoo URLs in OneNote for Mac
Scrivener for Mac User Manual indexed using PDFoo URLs in OneNote for Mac. Important information on how to use Scrivener is now just a click away.
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How to Add a Table of Contents (TOC) to Scanned PDFs

4/30/2014

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It's a good idea to run OCR on the scanned PDF BEFORE you start adding a table of contents (TOC) to the PDF. This is because OCR apps usually create a new PDF, and may not know how to preserve the table of contents from the original PDF when writing out the new PDF. Your hard work in creating the TOC would then be wasted. Moreover, PDFs with OCR text allow text to be selected which can be used to build the TOC quickly as described below.

Note that PDFOutliner comes with an automatic TOC feature which parses the fonts used in a PDF - such as larger fonts used for chapter headings - to build a TOC hierarchy. However this "AutoTOC" feature doesn't work on a scanned PDF (which contain no text) or even an OCR PDF (which do not assign different fonts to chapters/body text etc.) In such cases, you have to "walk" through the PDF page by page, and add TOC entries. Here's how:
  • In PDFOutliner, right click on the PDF and select "Single Page" view.
  • Make the TOC editor active by clicking on it.
  • Use CMD + up/down arrows to move to previous or next page.
  • To insert a TOC entry, hit CMD enter. To insert a child TOC entry, hit SHFT CMD enter. These commands insert a TOC entry pointing to top of the current page.
  • If your scanned PDF has OCR text, then you can select text on page and hit CMD T to insert a TOC entry with that selected text. This TOC entry will point precisely to where the text occurs on page.
  • Use Option + up/down/left/right arrow keys to move around selected TOC entries in the TOC hierarchy.
Save your TOC edits to PDF (CMD S) or hit "Preview" button on PDFOutliner toolbar to create a new PDF.
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Visual Note-taking with Curio and PDFoo

4/21/2014

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When you want to read and digest the content in a PDF thoroughly, PDFoo provides an efficient way to do so. The PDFoo app makes it possible to create a link to a specific location in the PDF, which allows you to focus on understanding the big picture while the details are just a click away.

Zengobi's Curio app has an amazing "lists" feature which allows you to position several list boxes on an infinite canvas (known as "idea space" in Curio.) If you select such a list box, and hit CMD+V to paste the clipboard contents, it gets automatically appended to the list. This makes it very convenient to use Curio with PDFoo: copy text from PDFoo, select a list box in Curio, and paste the content with a PDFoo URL appended to the text. The figure below shows a Curio idea space used to work through the OmniGraffle 6 user manual, and includes several "see also" links to detailed content in the PDF. In a similar manner, you can efficiently work through any important PDF using idea spaces in Curio and PDFoo copy-paste.
Zengobi Curio 8 list boxes arranged on idea space and copy-paste content from PDF in PDFoo into these boxes
Show list boxes in Zengobi Curio 8 arranged on an idea space, and content from OmniGraffle 6 User Manual has been copy-pasted from PDFoo into these boxes to quickly work through the PDF.
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PDFCombo update adds Print to PDF support 

4/21/2014

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PDFCombo app version 1.0.2
Hold down Option key when clicking on "Save Combined PDF..." button to bypass the save dialog.
PDFCombo version 1.0.2 adds two new features:
  • Now you can print to PDFCombo from any app by including it as a target in the Print > PDF dialog. See the section "To add an item to the PDF pop-up menu" in this Apple Guide on how to print PDFs directly to applications like Evernote and PDFCombo. Use this technique to collect several printouts into one PDF such as when collating a web article split over multiple pages into one PDF, or to pack several related web articles into a PDF.
  • Hold down Option and click on "Save Combined PDF" button to bypass the save dialog and create a PDF in the temporary directory.
PDFCombo is a free app for Mac OS X 10.6 and later, available from the Downloads page.
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Annotate PDFs in Evernote for Mac

4/21/2014

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Evernote for Mac supports embedding and annotating PDFs.
Evernote Premium subscribers can insert and annotate PDFs in notes.
Evernote allows you to conveniently insert PDFs into notes with drag-and-drop, and recently added support for annotating PDFs. Currently, this feature is only available for premium subscribers of Evernote. 

The advantages of keeping your PDFs in Evernote are: 
  • you can search across all your PDFs and annotations using the search box; 
  • you can organize your PDFs using Evernote's notebooks and tags; and 
  • you can keep PDF content together with text and audio in the same note, which is useful for attaching a short summary of the PDF.
Evernote provides a handy "annotation summary" option which pulls out all your annotations from the PDF and attaches it visually to the beginning of the PDF. This feature can be turned off at any point.

Text annotations in Evernote (shown as red text with white outlines in the screenshot) have more visual weight than text annotations made in Preview or other PDF editing apps, which makes it easier to review.

Unfortunately, Evernote doesn't support table of contents (TOC) in PDFs so you have to scroll through long PDFs. To work around this problem, you may prefer to embed shorter PDFs of 20-40 pages at a time. You can select a range of pages in Preview's thumbnail pane and drag it into Evernote, or use PDFExplode to separate a long PDF into logical chapters based on the TOC.
Annotation Summary feature in Evernote for Mac shows list of annotations in embedded PDFs
Evernote provides an annotation summary for the PDF and also shows useful context around the annotation.
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What are PDFoo URLs?

11/14/2013

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When you click on a pdfoo:// URL, the PDFoo app responds just like when you click on a http:// URL, the Safari app responds (or rather, your default web browser). But the similarity goes further. In a http URL, there is a "server" on the Internet that Safari connects to based on the URL clicked. In the example below, the server is "onekerato.com". The rest of the URL conveys which page on the server should be displayed by Safari.
How Safari Interprets HTTP URLs
Similarly, a pdfoo URL has a "prefix" which identifies the PDF that PDFoo should connect to, and the rest of the URL identifies which page or location in the PDF should be displayed. In most cases, the rest of the URL is just numbers which corresponds to page numbers & locations on a page. However, when you drag out a TOC entry from the PDF, you will get a readable URL. When you click on a pdfoo:// URL, PDFoo figures out which page or TOC entry to open. Moreover, just like every website is a unique "server", similarly each PDF on your Mac must be assigned a unique "prefix" in PDFoo before you start dragging or copying out URLs.
PDFoo URLs contain a prefix which identifies the PDF to open, and the rest of the URL points to the location in the PDF.
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