Free Software - (Mostly for Windows PCs)

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For the Office
Microsoft Office 2010 will no longer be supported after October 2020 and they are pushing people to adopt the subscription model. If you don't like to rent for your software, why not go for a freebie instead?

Do you need a pdf reader? It depends on whether you want to edit pdfs (use Libre Office) or just read them. For most purposes, you can easily read pdf files in Windows10 with no need to install anything first. Another handy thing is that you can save most web pages to pdf very easily using the 'Print' option and just save to file as a pdf. That's if the web page had been formatted properly.

Key W = Windows, M = Mac, L = Linux.

Libre Office Quirks
There is a glitch if you are using Windows in 'Dark Mode' as it will apply that theme and make the paper black on the screen. That is not very helpful.
On the Menu Bar, go to: Tools > Options > Preferences > Appearance and choose white paper. Done!

To generate a basic QR Code for your document or poster, on the Menu Bar: Insert > OLE Objects > QR Code and paste in your URL. Choose a suitable error level and away you go. To resize the generated QR code, hold down the Shift button and pull out a corner, otherwise it will lose its square shape.

Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
The police use Automatic Number Plate recognition (ANPR) systems to 'capture' vehicle number plates, which their computer (a 'PC'?) then checks up to see if the vehicle is insured or the driver disqualified, etc. That works by translating a camera view into machine-readable text as a limited form of OCR.

If you have a printer, it is highly likely that the installation disc or whatever has included an OCR app, such as Abbyy Finereader, an excellent OCR app which you normally would have to pay for. A good system would let you scan pages of a book and combine them into a single PDF file, with correct pagination. Other systems might only work with single photographs or scans which include printed text. The good part is that you don't have to pay for them.

PDF Tricks
You will find PDFs everywhere. PDF = 'Portable Document Format' and is the standard for distributing texts which 'cannot' be edited (but see below). There have also been a few different versions of PDF as new features were added but they all seem to be very similar.

1. Don't Install a PDF Reader
As they are nearly always bloatware. You can create your own PDFs from such as 'Word' documents by 'exporting' them from such as Libre Office or MS Office. All web browsers can display and print PDF files. Microsoft Edge is a standard web browser which comes with Windows 10 and 11 and it does a good job of displaying PDFs. Like the others, you can 'Print to file' if you want to just save a few pages. MS Edge also lets you view two pages at a time.

2. Shrinking a PDF
You find yourself with a large document such as Yorkshire Archaeological Journal - Volume 82 at Archive.org but you only want to keep part of it. You first download the PDF (right-click and 'save as') from the list and save it to your PC. Having completed the download, you double-click the saved file and it will probably open in Edge or another web browser, depending on what's installed on the computer.

The clever bit is to locate the section you found interesting, for example 'The Re-building of Cusworth Hall' which is pages 304 to 306, right-click the page and, instead of printing it out, choose to 'Print to File' which will create a new PDF and allow you to choose a selection of pages, such as the range '304 - 306.' Now you will have saved just that section as a new file without destroying the original. By the way, the page numbers used by Edge will probably not be the same as those in the original document because such as: covers, prefaces, extending maps and contents pages might not have been part of the original numbering scheme.

3. Extracting the Pics
Supposing someone sent you a PDF with embedded photos and you wanted to extract some of them. A simple method is to maximise the page in 'Edge' or whatever (press f11) and do a screen capture using the 'Prt Sc' (Print Screen) button on the keyboard. That saves a screengrab to the clipboard. You open up a simple graphics editor such as '3D paint' (part of Windows) and import the picture with Ctrl + 'V' and now you can do things to the image then save it as a JPG or PNG.

Another way to save pictures from a PDF is a bit hit-and-miss but it is a superior method if it lets you do it. Try it out with a downloaded catalogue or a magazine PDF. You need Libre Office or similar installed and some sort of photo editor as before. In Windows Explorer, right-click the PDF file and choose 'Open with' > 'Libre Office Draw' and click it. With luck, you will be able to edit the page layout and move its component parts about. If a picture in the PDF has been over-printed with text, you can get the full picture simply by selecting it and clip-boarding it. It won't grab the text layer either unless the text had been embedded in the picture. You might find all kinds of things hidden under the text.

Find a picture you wish to save and drag a corner of it to maximise it on the page, then use Control+C to save it to clipboard. Having clip-boarded it, open your photo editor (eg. XnView or Faststone) and in the Edit tab look for 'import clipboard' to bring it in as a new image. Now you can play about with it and crop it or tweak its contrast, etc. Some PDFs will have been saved from full-page graphics and all you will be able to do is grab the full page as a graphic. Also, some PDF files with a lot of pages and components might overload the Draw app and crash it. Then you might be forced to end the program using the Task Manager (look it up). When it does work, it's a beaut.

4. 'Talking' PDFs
If you don't have any specific PDF reader installed, clicking on a PDF file will probably open it in Microsoft Edge and that is all well and good. But, Edge has a trick up its sleeve. You can right-click on the document and get it to 'read aloud' in a choice of voices, which lets you get on with something else as it reads out the document. Better still, if you use the Audacity trick described on the Audio free software page, you can actually save the narration as a Wav or MP3 file, ready to be used in perhaps a video presentation. 'Death by Powerpoint' or a video compilation could become just that bit more endurable.

There are some snags with the audio, though, and not just with the copyright aspect. It's the timing and pronunciation that can be variable. If the PDF has been generated from your own document (eg. a 'docx'), you could edit it to be more flowing in style. You might need extra commas and full-stops to create pauses as sometimes the words run together as one. Also, it can't pronounce some words well, such as certain names, 'ginnel' and even 'is' - which sounded like 'eyes.' When editing the audio, you will need to take out long silences caused by page breaks, etc. Still, it is a neat and useful trick to acquire and you could be quite creative by building up different voices and have them 'argue' with each other.

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