Unshelved by Bill Barnes and Gene Ambaum
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Monday, July 15, 2013

One reason I like Adobe's .PDFs

So a friend found a freely-available book on the Internet he wanted to print out, but it was in Word format, meaning none of the pages lined up or the formatting was correct. After fiddling with the file for about an hour in a vain attempt to format it correctly and put it into a .PDF, I had a what-the-hell-am-I-doing moment and just put the title into Chrome's address/search bar and presto! A .PDF version of the same book was the first result, where the author had self-published. This had pictures, tables, the whole thing formatted somewhat amateurishly (hey, it was a fan writing their own handbook for a gaming system, so I'll cut him slack, even though he really does not seem to know the difference between a colon and semi-colon), but consistent with the table of contents and as the author actually intended it. Sometimes it's better to find the wheel rather than re-invent it, what can I say? All hail the Portable Document Format!

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