Digital Workshop

For those of you that use PDFs in your publication, maybe this might be worth a look. I have not used it yet, but seems like it, in theory, would be useful.

http://www.snapfiles.com/reviews/pdf2exe/pdf2exe.html

Thanx, might just come in handy.

Thanks for mentioning PDF2EXE freeware. I downloaded and have installed it. Here's what I found:

First, its very simple to use. You select a PDF file and click SAVE (which is SAVE AS) and it compresses the PDF and adds it's own viewer to make an EXE file. A 69 kb PDF file then was 700 kb as an EXE, so there's slight overhead to make this work.

To run this in OPUS, you need a Trigger (I used a Button Object) and the Action of Launch where I specified the "test.exe" file containing my PDF info. In two heart beats the screen filled completely with the PDF and menuing at the top of the screen to move around and print. To get back to OPUS, I had to Exit out of the test.exe program, so you can't run this in a smaller Object window inside an OPUS Page like you can with a DocView Object.

On my second attempt, I found I could turn OFF several of the menuing options (Menu, Status) at the top of the screen when I made my next test run. ALL of these Freeware exe files say "Created with PDF2EXE Freeware" on the top line. For $79 USD you can buy their PRO version which doesn't have that message, and a few more options like not allowing Printing.

Again, PDF2EXE has it's own built-in viewer software to display a PDF file, so the viewing computer does NOT have to have Adobe's Acrobat installed to see the PDF info, which can be a nice feature.

It's good to know about this option for those situtations where you aren't sure if your viewer has the ability to see PDF files, and you want a full screen PDF, rather than a smaller view on your OPUS Page.

Thanks for finding this.

Today I was thankful that I remembered this thread.

One of my older pub includes many PDF files, which previously interacted with Opus with no problems. When I tested this old pub on a computer with the latest version of Adobe, I encountered problems, which rightly or wrongly, I put down to some incompatibilities I'd read about between older and latest versions of Adobe.

I decided that converting these PDFs to EXEs would be the way to go, so I downloaded a copy of PDF2EXE. It worked without problem until I tried to convert a file containing 34 pages of tables and text. This attempt produced "Out of memory" error messages. Given the amount of memory on the test machines, this was unlikely.

Despite this error message, I could print the file from Acrobat, so I did that. I'm guessing that there is an error in the file, and that error caused PDF2EXE to hang. Incidentally, although the developers could not help, their reply was fast -- within 2 hours.

The thought of re-keying this large complex document was daunting. My solution might interest others who find themselves in a similar situation.

Using Google and Download.com, I found several files which claimed to be able to convert a scanned image to a PDF document. As I expected, some applications did not support this claim. Others did, but were far too expensive for my budget. And...I found nothing that was free and worked

I eventually settled on JGS-Scan, available from http://www.jgs-soft.com/ for US49.

This worked like a dream. I placed the printed copy on the ADF, clicked scan in JGS-Scan and within a couple of minutes had the required PDF file. PDF2EXE converted this to the EXE. IMHO, well worth the cost

It's likely that from now on I will convert PDF files to EXEs when using them with Opus.

I use the pro version of PDFExe and found that it does everything is says it will do. You do not have the clutter around the screen as you do with Adobe on a Docvew window which for projected presentation is excelent.

It does take a bit of care in the early days when setting up each .exe file to ensure that all the right tick boxes are selected or not selected and it is working as you want it to.

Very happy with the programme which also works in Powerpoint as well and so far so good no glitches.

Danny