Missed a day or two of Gurus Unleashed? Don’t worry. Catch up with these important events and stories that happened in the world of PDF and Acrobat.

News

Just when you thought it was safe to go back to PDF, Adobe issued a warning about a “serious vulnerability” in Acrobat and Reader on Windows, Mac, and Unix. As is often the case with Acrobat exploits, this newest vulnerability is a JavaScript error that, if exploited, can enable malicious code execution on any current version of Acrobat or Reader–that’s Adobe Reader and Acrobat 9.1, 8.1.4, and 7.11 and earlier. The fix Adobe recommends is to disable JavaScript until a patch can be released. You can do this by opening Acrobat’s or Reader’s Preferences, going to the JavaScript category, and unchecking the box beside “Enable Acrobat JavaScript.” Naturally, all of this has Adobe rethinking PDF security.

Microsoft released Office 2007 SP2 with improved support for PDF 1.5, PDF/A, and other formats.

Planet PDF reports that Callas Software received the lead score among seven PDF/A validation tools.

As reported last month, Adobe embarked on–and completed–an overhaul of its User to User Forums. Formerly a clunky, Web-circa-1998-stye hodge-podge amalgamation of the Adobe and Macromedia user forums, the new version boasts a sleek, minimal user interface–and it works, too. Shredding the Document, the Acorbat product managers’ blog, proudly proclaims the new features, which include: e-mail and RSS subscription integration, file and image attachments for forum posts, and a new points system to encourage users to participate in community discussions.

Prompted in part by the frequent security vulnerabilities discovered in Acrobat and Reader, Mikko Hypponen at F-Secure advocates abandoning Adobe Reader altogether. PC Magazine’s Larry Seltzer agrees but can’t find another PDF client he likes more than Reader.

Via the Adobe Acrobat User Community comes the announcement of Adobe partnering with Arcot to e-mail ultra-secure, encrypted PDF documents such as bank statements, bills, and government notices. A new managed service named SEND will enable organizations and agencies to deliver sensitive content to customers and constituents instead of waiting for them to go get the information via a group portal Website.

“Include ads in PDFs? That’s a joke, right? That’s just stupid,” said an anonymous commentor to the Designorati.com announcement last year of the launch of a joint venture between Adobe and Yahoo! Publisher Network that would dynamically pull contextual ads from YPN into PDFs containing special coding. As it turns out, the commentor was correct: Adobe killed the Ads for Adobe PDF Powered by Yahoo! Beta program in April. The reason, says Adobe, is “due to a reassessment of priorities in the current economic environment.”

XChange UK released the X-PDF 9 Guide, a listing of PDF tools and Acrobat plug-ins.

Products

In last month’s “Best of Acrobat and PDF” we told you about the launch of the free PDF to Word conversion service. This month Nitro PDF followed it up with the release of a free PDF-to-Excel conversion service. This new service claims to easily convert PDFs into editable Excel files so that tables and spreadsheets within PDFs may be extracted and used within Excel, OpenOffice, and Google Docs. Meanwhile Adobe Presenter 7 beefs up your PowerPoint presentations with integrated media.

Not to be outdone in the PDF-to-something-conversion-service arena, Solid Documents opened up the PDF to Mobile service, which converts PDFs to HTML for better viewing on handheld device screens. The services tries to preserve the PDF formatting via XML and CSS, including reordering paragraphs and columns, and strips out headers and footers. Visit the official Website to upload PDFs for conversion or to obtain the e-mail address to which PDFs may be sent, and from which the resultant HTML will be returned.

And, just so I can once again type “PDF-to-something,” Adolix Software released Adolix PDF to Image, which converts PDFs into TIFF, JPEG, PNG, or BMP formats. Pages can be converted one at a time, as a range of pages, or by exporting the entire PDF into separate, per-page images. Except for PDF-to-carbon-triplicate-conversion and PDF-to-T.P., Adolix PDF to Image pretty much rounds out the PDF-to-something-conversion class of software.

If you prefer to do your PDF-to-something conversions yourself, check out the new version 5.0 of Recosoft Corporation’s PDF2Office. It includes a new PDF to Excel conversion system along with updates that better enable PDFs to get back into native and XML-based Word and PowerPoint file formats.

Check out Solid Documents offerings for even more PDF converting fun.

PDF Tools updated its 3-Heights line of products–3-Heights Image to PDF Converter, 3-Heights Document Converter Service, and 3-Heights PDF Validator–to version 1.8 and released the 3-Heights OCR Enterprise Add-On, which brings text recognition into the other products.

Mid-month Amyumi debuted PDF Analyzer, which, as the name implies, analyzes the structure of PDFs and PDF/As. According to the site: “In addition to document analysis, you can also use PDF Analyzer to compare documents, verify sensitive metadata, and extract confidential information. PDF Analyzer ensures that documents are well-structured, accurate, and optimized.”

Although there is a significant potential for abuse, Eltima Software’s $39.95 Recover PDF Password for Mac can be a lifesaver when you’ve forgotten the password you used to secure a PDF.

Adobe went after PowerPoint in earnest by adding collaborative presentations to Acrobat.com. At the same time, Adobe released InContext Editing 1.5 to make Web editing even easier.

The Ghent PDF Workgroup updated its PDF testing tools, Ghent Output Suite, to version 3.

SintraWorks updated its Mac OS X PDF editor PDFClerk Pro to version 3.7.

How-To

While you’re waiting for your PDF to be converted to Excel or for mobile devices, why not take a break and pick up the ancient hair-pullingly-frustrating art of origami? Dan Shea, Planet PDF Managing Editor, breaks up the hot and heavy product release and security vulnerability news with a well-timed diversion: downloadable origami diagrams in, of course, PDF format.

Lori DeFurio has a short but very cool tutorial to walk you through the intricacies of converting Excel documents to PDF using PDFMaker.

When a projector failed during his slideshow, Rick Treitman saved a doomed presentation at the MIT Enterprise Forum with Acrobat.com’s ConnectNow. ConnectNow was updated during April with new features that Julien Levadoux describes. Many of those features, Erik Larson notes, fill in gaps that have driven the enterprise away from Microsoft’s document sharing and collaboration tool, SharePoint. Even the government–”Government 2.0,” says David Yun, is jumping onboard with Acrobat Connect.

Learn to use Acrobat’s Article tool in this video tutorial from RC at Layers Magazine.

Add images to a PDF in Acrobat 9 with the help of David R. Mankin and IconLogic’s WeBLOG (via the Adobe Acrobat User Community).

Print PDF bookmarks.