Simple Informations

PrimoPDF is a free software that installs itself as a printer in your system. It will accept the print requests and allows you to save them as a PDF file. So you can create a PDF file from virtually any file in your system. If you need to create a PDF file from an Office document you may use the export feature available in OpenOffice.org.

PrimoPDF also allows you to change the quality of the output files to four preset ones and one custom setting.

PrimoPDF is light on system resources and produces good quality PDF files. Although you might end up with file having its own path printed into it, PrimoPDF can be used as a basic tool to create PDF files. Download the Windows installer here

Opera 9.5 failed to process TinyMCE correctly. so if you enterd something in the HTML editor and came back to Visual editor mode.. you won’t see any text. Check out thses screen shots.

Actually it is caused by wrong implementation of JavaScript in TinyMCE. More about it is explained at opera development blog. In the race to win Acid3 test Opera made the implementation of web standards strict. It was this that caused the error.

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As of now the problem has been solved in Opera 9.51 and this post is being written using Opera 9.51. Another known issue with TinyMCE was scrabling of text when pressing the ENTER key. This is also solved now.

Pig font viewer is a free utility that allows you to preview your fonts. You can enter any text you want and click on the list of fonts shown from your fonts library. You can also select fonts saved in a directory by browsing to that directory through Pig Font Viewer.

If you want to have the fonts loaded in Pigfontviewer when you open it just install it by right clicking on it. It is available for Linux, Windows and MAC platforms. You can download Pig font viewer from their web site.

The easiest way to enable support for the new Office 2007 file formats in Office XP is to install the Migration pack provided by Microsoft free of cost. With the introduction of the XML standard in file format, the new files with extensions ending in x (docx, xslx, pptx) will not be compatible with the older Microsoft Office.

With Migration pack installed you can either save in all the New office supported formats as well as open all the new format files. Here is a screen shot of the Save As dialogue in Office XP with 2007 compatibility pack installed.

Main advantages f the new file format are that it is a standard XML format and also the compression ratio is better for the XML formats. You can open all the 2007 Office files using any archiving tool.

The Office 1007 compatibility pack is free of cost and can be downloaded form Microsoft Download center. You must install all High Priority updates from Microsoft update center before installing this pack. Here is the Office 2007 compatibility pack download page at Microsoft Download Center. The file is a 27.5Mb Windows Executable.

The icons that are used by programs such as Photoshop or Microsoft Office are actually stored inside the exe or dll files coming along with the program. To capture and save these icons you can use two methods. One is by using a program that can open an exe file such as PE resource explorer. The other method is simpler and uses a small program that is used only to extract icons from exe and dll files.

Copicone is an amazingly small program which was created by Guillaume Ryder. It is only 9Kb in size and comes in a zipped package weighing only 4.5Kb. Copicone is free just like all the other utilities avilable at Guillaume’s web site. Just open the dll file or exe file using copycone and you can see the icons. Select the one you want to save and click Save.

Copycone is available only in French. But the limited number of buttons will allow you to easily locate the appropriate controls neede.

Download the Icon extractor - Copicone here. If you want to create your own icons for free read it here.

Today I downloaded the firefox 3 beta version. It is the latest version available and is in beta testing stage. Mozilla has added a list of improvements to the what’s new page. Mozilla has changed the entire look and architecture of Fireox to a neater one.

Here is what the excited Firefox team has said -

Firefox 3 is based on the Gecko 1.9 Web rendering platform, which has been under development for the past 32 months. Building on the previous release, Gecko 1.9 has more than 12,000 updates including some major re-architecting to provide improved performance, stability, rendering correctness, and code simplification and sustainability. Firefox 3 has been built on top of this new platform resulting in a more secure, easier to use, more personal product with a lot more under the hood to offer website and Firefox add-on developers.

The most notable improvement is with the default theme. FireFox is much more beautiful now. Also the memory usage has decreased but not to an extent where it can be considered effective. The Google search bar at top has got auto suggest. When you type your address the History drop down is shown in a more user friendly way.

Although FireFox has greatly improved on the looks department almost all of my addons were incompatible with the beta release. So are the themes. So if you don’t want to sacrifice much wait until FF is out of beta to upgrade, upgrade now if you just want to find out the new features. This is a list of known issues with FireFox 3 beta 5.

So if you are impressed go get Firefox here. It is available in 45 languages.