Windows Picture Fax Viewer

The format anyone can (and does) read

Files in PDF format have become fairly popular and wildly ubiquitous in the past few years. Newspapers are "delivered" in PDF more and more, as the paper boy disappears.

In the past six months, I have had half a dozen legal dealings with various government and corporate departments where we exchanged papers and contracts via PDF. Filling out a form, signing it, scanning it and emailing has put the fax machine at the same risk of paper boys.

And add one super-important development of the past couple of years: E-books. They often come in PDF format.

The reason PDFs have become popular is because they are truly one-size-fits-all. No matter what kind of computer or device you have; no matter what operating system you use; not matter how huge or small your screen, one PDF is enough. It looks the same for everyone.

PDF was invented by the Adobe company. Adobe always said it gave away, and gives away its PDF reading software in order to boost PDFs.

Adobe Acrobat is hugely expensive software used to make PDFs, and if Adobe can get people to read PDFs, it might be able to get people to buy Acrobat to make PDFs.

This has partly worked - a subject for another column.

In the meantime, because PDFs are popular, competitors of Adobe have sprung up everywhere. They also give away readers, all of which - every one of them, no exceptions - are better than the Adobe Acrobat reader in many ways.

Typically, they are smaller in bulk, faster to load and operate, and contain more actual, attractive features.

(Phone and tablet users, please see below because we've got you covered.)

A few weeks ago, a California company, Nitro PDF Software, shipped an upgrade to its nice, free reader. Critics were very kind, and for a reason. Nitro is a fine reader.

There are two huge features of the new Nitro. The first is that it will create PDFs from other files. While this is nothing new on its own, the idea of doing this from inside the reader is intriguing. The new Nitro also lets you sign documents on the fly - provided you create a graphic of your signature, an easy task requiring little more than a scanner.

The Nitro PDF reader has a zillion other features as well, including filling forms that do not have specific fields, commenting and collaborating with colleagues and some handy security that Abode hasn't even thought of yet.

Windows Picture & Fax Viewer--where does it select the pics to ...

At the bottom of the window there are arrows backwards and forwards, but these don't take me to the next pic of my 10 jpg attachments.These arrows cycle through a bunch of files--mostly named .gif or occasionally jpg--which are mostly the icons or advertising pics from the borders of web pages.But not exclusively from web pages--some of the pics cycled through are jpgs that were sent to me as email attachments. For each one of the 10 pics my friend sent me in this email, the Pic&Fax Viewer opens the pic, then cycles through about 30 gifs and jpgs, and begins repeating itself. The 30 files shown are diferent for each of the 10 attachments.Some of them were from web pages that I had viewed under the "in private" mode of the browser (IE8). (and, sorry...they weren't porn --it was worse!--the gif icons were from pages on medical issues that I would thought would remain private if I viewed them on the "in private" mode.

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