Wednesday, February 28, 2007

The nice folks at the College of Arts and Science Information Technology Resources have a nice new web page, http://artsandscience.usask.ca/it/ that offers a nice clean way into all the various things they offer. We here at What's Up went first to the free software they offer (hey, you never know) and came across this wee gem: CutePDF. The world seems to run on pdf files these days, the point being that they work well and are ubiquitous and can be opened and read in the format they were created in by anyone on any computer equipped with Adobe Acrobat Reader. The latter program is free and does a swell job of reading pdf files, but it will not create new pdf files for you. That can be done in most civilized word processors, if you have a word processed file to convert, but it is sometimes nice to be able to turn any file into a pdf for storage or distribution. The excellent but sometimes costly for-pay version of Acrobat Professional will do that very well (and university folk get a great discount through the campus computer store). But it seems CutePDF can do that too, and for free. Instructors thinking of putting together documents for distribution via PAWS might be especially keen to check this out.