So long Adobe Acrobat... supporting a e-book only publishing strategy

I have been using for a long time Adobe Acrobat to support my publisher activity. I was working on my business PC, with the standard agreement that software can be used on a reasonable way during and outside office hours for personal activities. All changed when my company got purchased by a bigger one, that remastered all the PCs to a new corporate standard, with no Adobe Acrobat license.

So I had to look for alternatives.

Two of them, combined, are worth using:

• the SmallPDF website, for basic split/merge and efficient compress operations; 
• the fabulous PDFill software, for other operations.

The recurring script for publishing is the following:

1. Get all sources from archive.org, Gallica, wherever.
2. Decide for publishing strategy: untouched contents (images or resized PDF) and/or manual transcription; include or not reviews.
3. Use PDFill to extract the PDF pages topublish.
4. Use PDFill to resize PDF pages to A5 (A5 148x210mm is not a built-in value).
5. Use PDFill to insert header and page numbers (no roman numbers available, even in the pay edition for now).
6. Use LibreOffice for first pages (Title Page, TOC, foreword/presentation...) and export it to PDF (alternatively use Inkscape to design first and last pages and export them to PDF).
7. Use LibreOffice for last pages and export it to PDF.
8. Use PDFill to merge all the pages into one file.
9. Use PDFill to update PDF file information.
10. Publish the PDF as is on web sites.
11. Use PDFill to create an image for the title page (and publish it on websites, blogs...)
12. Use SmallPDF to reduce the size of the PDF File for publication on document sharing sites.
13. Publish on document sharing sites.

Multiple browsing

A short reminder for those needing to cope with multiple activities. That's my case as I'm a consultant in a big great company, a small publisher, and an activist.

So I need multiple browsers running at the same time, more precisely multiple instances of the same browser of choice, that is a Firefox variant called Palemoon (I'll talk another time of this particular choice).

First of all, I'm using a Portable version, easy to backup as a directory tree, and reinstall / run from another Windows PC. No fuzzy discussion about the choice of the OS, please: most companies still use Windows, home PC, too, so go to the application.

Once the portable version is installed, just clone it as many times as required by your activity, and create separate shortcuts for each instance.

In the shortcut command line, add the following switch;

-no-remote 

And you are done.

See also: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Opening_a_new_instance_of_Firefox_with_another_profile

It is IT. Is it?

I've tried to find a funny name. Almost succeeded.