I don’t have much love for the PDF (the latest episode between Adobe and Microsoft only confirms this), but unfortunately PDF is a fact of life. For me that life doesn’t include Adobe which is on the top of my list of companies I try to stay away from for being so blatantly arrogant and making pig software (in terms of size, intrusiveness and slowness).

I use FoxIt for PDF viewing and most of my PDF generation is actually handled through my custom applications that use ActiveReports which includes PDF generation. For those instances where a printer driver is needed to capture output from say Word, GhostScript works well enough.

It happens both of these solutions are free, but that’s not the reason I use them. FoxIt actually works very well and GhostScript is a bit of a pain but workable. There are many other solutions of varying degrees of pricing from free to ridiculous. Adobe’s Acrobat is about the worst of the bunch.

As far as the readers go, they are all sub-optimal for reading content. It seems that most PDF readers have a hard time presenting your data in a reasonable page view. The page is either too big to fit all onto a page, or to small to read when you do fit a side by side view. Columns too are a PITA. Man do I hate editors that send multi-column proofs in PDF forms that want annotations on the document. It always turns into a major scroll-o-rama. As a page presentation format, this is a horrible situation. Especially when you compare it to something like Word's Reader view.

One thing that I don’t have addressed is PDF editing and form filling. Are there any decent alternatives out there besides Acrobat? Free or otherwise? I wouldn't mind consolidating all my PDF needs but without having to use Acrobat. Anybody have any recommendations? I did some searching around and ran into a couple of solutions that looked interesting but got really bad reviews that I didn’t want to bother.

Form filling is one thing. The other is signatures. Eh, I should have this one addressed by now but frankly I’ve not figured out how to do this efficiently. I find myself having to send W9 forms to customers constantly and since I travel so much I’m often not near a fax machine.  Even if I do have a fax machine handy it’s a pain to have to print the form sign it and then fax it. It’s prefilled but because of the signature and date it has to be man handled. It sure would be nice to be able to fill in a date and send an attachment to my MaxEmail account that faxes the thing or just email it. So <sheepish grin> what’s a good way to handle this using PDF?