Solving technology problems, one at a time
The error “The document “filename.pdf” could not be exported as filename.pdf” started appearing in Safari on attempting to save PDFs from the browser.
The problem appears to be update-related: apparently a recent Acrobat update left an old file in the plugins directory that needs to be deleted.
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Most of what I read for work these days is in PDF or Kindle format, and there’s an awful lot of it. Trying to make sense out of the ever-faster firehose of information, most of it on subjects that are new to me, has forced me to rethink my research methods, or lack of them. I’ve never been able to take great notes by hand – I’m a much faster typist than hand-writer, and depend on being able to search within my notes, so I’ve mainly concentrated on electronic workflows.
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The other day I received a PDF file that need to be converted back to Word or text format. But every attempt to save it from Acrobat Pro to Word resulted in the error shown above:
Continue reading“Acrobat was unable to make this document accessible because of the following error:
Could not save page structure. [12]
Please not that some pages of this document may have been changed. Because of this failure, you are advised to not save these changes.”
I was recently sent a document in PDF format for editing and revision. Unfortunately the author had protected the document from copying, pasting, annotation, page extraction – in short everything necessary to be able to
Continue readingWriting notes and sketching on PDF’s using a Tablet PC can be an excellent replacement for a blackboard or whiteboard in the classroom, meetings or lectures. Easier than using Powerpoint, especially when you want to improvise, it is particularly useful for annotating complex diagrams, music, mathematical problems, or anything requiring gridlines or graph paper.
On a Lenovo Tablet PC, you can use the clipping function to drop PDF’s into the Journal application and type or write on them with the pen. The pen has good enough resolution to write legibly, and draw lines and curves.
Continue readingThe case of the missing confirmation dialog
A problem I’ve encountered several times on Vista: dialogs will open, then refuse to disappear, and the Windows Task Manager simply tells you they are “expecting a response”. They are “expecting a response” from a confirmation dialog that has completely disappeared.
This seems to happen when another window pops up and steals focus unexpectedly. The confirmation dialog is not hidden behind any other windows, nor minimized, but simply vanished. This can be very confusing even when you know what you are looking for. This happened while I was installing Adobe Reader. Here’s what it looked like when it got stuck:
Links to PDF’s can be made to target specific places in the document by appending a number/pound (#) sign to the end of the URL, followed by “page=[number]: Example: target page 10 http://server.com/title.pdf#page=10 Example: Target
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