2008
09.04
Tags: Coach, Medical Forms, Registrations, Signatures, Team Pages, Tools
Posted in Soccer | Comments Off
With Bonzi, if you want to print out all the forms for your team and you are a coach with coach tools turned on:
# you can go to your team page which you access as an administrator at www.capitolhillsoccer.org/sam. # Since your tools are on, I’ve resent your instructions on how to access this by hitting update (I think).
# You log-in at the admin site with the same username and password that you used to register and then you can turn on or use your team pages.
# Follow the instructions/help given there.
# There’s a line to click on that will print out all the player forms or you can do which ever ones you need.
# If you want the players to do their own (they should have gotten one as an attachement when they registered, but that doesn’t always work), they can go to the club website at www.capitolhillsoccer.org, log-in, click on past registrations, then click on print forms.
# I find it is easier to print them all out and get the parent signatures at practice. Hold on to the forms for the season.
2008
08.14
Tags: Default Pdf Reader, Legal Documents, Mail, Pdf Button, Pdfs, Reading Pdf Documents, Signature, Signatures, Special Purpose, Text Tool, Tips And Tricks, Transparent Backgrounds
Posted in Geek | Comments Off
I bought both PDF Clerk and PDFPen for a “comparison”:http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/31/feature-review-pdfclerk-vs-pdfpen/ and there were some great reviews. We need this specifically to add signatures to legal documents, so the needs are very specific. We get a PDF from a legal firm and then we return the documents as PDFs and then print the originals. Here is the net:
* I picked PDFPen because the review didn’t catch it, but PDF Clerk files just explode in size when you add a signature. For instance, a 100KB document becomes 125KB when you add one signature with PDFPen and becomes 4MB with PDF Clerk. I suspect that PDF Clerk sees a bitmap and turns the whole document into a bit map.
* PDFPen as noted definitely has problems reading PDF documents. I had one where it just crashed (how rude, need more error checking!), but for most of the signature pages that are 1-10 pages, it seems fine. So you still should set Preview as the default PDF reader and just use PDFPen for the signature special purpose.
Here is the method for signing things…
* First you have to sign a document and then scan it in. Crop it and make it a nice JPEG that you put somewhere.
* When you open an attachment from Mail, you open as PDFPen and then you choose File/Import and select the signature.jpg
* Now choose Edit/Make Transparent and click on the white part. Now you can drag the signature down
* If you need to add Title and Name then click on the Text tool and type it in. Now double select these and paste them on all the signature pages.
* _DO NOT SAVE THE DOCUMENTS_ I repeat, don’t save them. PDFPen 3.5 has this terrible bug where if you choose save, then it makes all the transparent backgrounds solid again. They know about it, but don’t have a fix time. Instead, choose File/Print and click on the PDF button and choose Save as PDF and this merges the signatures into your document and seems to keep things transparent.
* You can also from the File/print/PDF choose Mail as PDF (why they stuck this in the Print menu, I don’t know, maybe someone from Microsoft works at Apple 
this will bring up Mail and then you can mail it to whomever..
2008
07.17
Tags: Clone, Clones, Conversion Product, Conversions, Free Converter, Freeware Program, Google, Matrix, Oem Version, Pdf Adobe Acrobat, Pdf Converters, Powerpoint Slides, Primopdf, Project Conversion, Royalty, Signature, Signatures, Software Pdf, Visio, Wikipedia, Windows Machine, Word Acrobat, Www Adobe
Posted in Geek | Comments Off
We are getting so many documents now in PDF, it would be easier just to paste a signature in. To do that we need Adobe Acrobat or one of its clones. There are an amazing number of editors since Adobe allows anyone to create a writer royalty free. “Wikipedia”:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software has a big list. (Even Office 2007 with some obscure add on can now write PDF).
* Adobe Acrobat Standard. This seems to be all hat you need. There is a “pro”:http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/matrix.html version whcih adds AutoCAD, Visio and Project conversion, digitally signing PDFs, comparing difference and an even more expensive Pro Extended (what a name!) that lets you make PowerPoint slides additions and embed video into Word. It is $99 for the OEM version and $149 for retail. So amazingly expensive for a conversion product.
* “Acrobat.com”:http://acrobat.com. If you just want to do a simple conversion of Word or other documents into PDF, there is a free utility on the web. Only lets you do five conversions per signup though.
* “Freepdfconvert.com”:http://freepdfconvert.com. If you don’t have a Mac, then there are many free pdf converters on the web. Here is the top hit on Google.
* “Primopdf”:http://primopdf.com is the free converter that runs on your Windows machine.
* “NitroPDF”:http://nitropdf.com is a clone of Adobe Acrobat. It is $99 for the Pro and $49 for Express and there is a free thing called PrimoPDF that just creates. Actually on the Mac, you don’t really need that is Apple includes a PDF by printing. We need the Pro version because it allows editing and adding graphics (like signatures).
I’ve used these, there seem to be a host of google:”PDF Edit” around that are more reasonable priced as “TUAW”:http://www.tuaw.com/2007/03/31/feature-review-pdfclerk-vs-pdfpen/
* “PDFLab”:http://lifehacker.com/software/pdf/download-of-the-day-pdflab-154095.php is a freeware program that also reportedly lets you add images but most folks report it “doesn’t”:http://www.macupdate.com/reviews.php?id=15818 work. It also crashed for me on a one page document, so I think it probably hasn’t been updated for the most recent Acrobat file formats.
* “Skimapp”:http://skim-app.sourceforge.net/ is also open source and allows annotations (but now so does OS X Preview). It can add circles, lines, text, but doesn’t seem to allow adding images 
* “PDFpen”:http://smileonmymac.com/PDFpen. Does all the basics. The main issue is that it died on a 300 page document in the review and you can add in graphics for signatures and it’s files are much smaller. The signature plus the file is 168KB vs 1.5MB for PDF Clerk. For $95, you create fillable forms. I don’t really need this but could be useful for things like being a soccer registrar On balance, since our PDFs are short, we’ll take PDFPen. Also, they have a deal where for $75, you get 5 licenses, which is pretty good!
* “PDFClerk”:http://www.sintraworks.com/ is $60 and is uglier but you can also place signatures on. It also lets you clip out a section of a PDF document (for creating an attachment to a memo) and handles renumbering. The good news though is that it doesn’t crash on big documents but it does bloat the files. I took a 50K one page PDF and added a 150K image that was the signature and the result is a 1.5MB PDF. Sigh.