Make money from PDF documents

Adobe has partnered with Yahoo! for an interesting advertising idea — running ads alongside PDF documents in the ubiquitous Acrobat Reader. Officially called Ads for Adobe PDF, it allows PDF publishers to monetize their content without having to find advertisers themselves. That’s because Yahoo! provides them as part of their ad serving system.

Much like a typical search results page, ads are run along the right-hand side of Adobe Acrobat Reader. A publisher simply uploads a PDF document to Yahoo!’s ad serving system. The PDF gets analyzed to determine the most relevant ads (similar to contextual advertising). A set of marketers’ ads are served up to readers of the PDF. It also claims to allow you to block competitors’ ads from showing up in your PDF. Lastly, publishers get the full performance tracking and reporting capabilities of regular Yahoo! search advertisers.

Free Office substitute online

Though it doesn't support all Microsoft Office features, the no-cost ThinkFree Online can use the same file formats, making it the most Office-compatible online productivity suite- it even works with Office 2007 files.
The package, which combines a word processor, spreadsheet, and presentation program, runs in your browser, lets you store documents (upto 1GB) on ThinkFree's server. It has two editing modes, Quick Edit and Power Edit. Both have a toolbar interface but no standard menus. A subscription version, currently in beta, also runs as a desktop app.
Writer, the word processor, opens and saves even complex Word 2007 and older files, but edits in full-page view only. Calc, which is rich in financial, scientific, and engineering functions, opens complex Excel files, displays most charts well, and imports Pivot Tables. The Show app opens elaborate PowerPoint files and, in Power Edit mode, resembles PowerPoint. It offers basic transition effects.
If one needs both Office compatibility and online storage, it's a good choice.

Strip and Format text from PDF documents

PDF Text Online is a free online utility, that can:

• Converts PDF text quickly and accurately
• Handles all fonts and languages (including Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and more)
• Provides easy access to form data, document properties, and bookmarks
• Doesn't require a software download -- it works in your browser!

Upload your PDF document and the service will present it to you in text format, allow you to change some formatting elements like the font, and page layout of the text. In the end, you get a text document that you can save for later or just text your can copy and paste without having to worry about the formatting.

The developers of PDF Textonline developed an application called PDFTextStream, which they've incorporated into the PDFTextOnline Web app. The app uses Ajax to smoothly upload your document, strip out the images, and give you a clean and simple way to get to the document's text. The tool even retains any bookmarks and document information that might be included with the PDF.

If you just need to copy and paste the text, you don't need to save the document, you can just copy the text from the Web app. If you need to edit the text, you'll have to save the document as a text file. Click "save all text," and the service will present you with a zip archive that contains the text of your PDF document inside it. Once you've unzipped the file, you can use any text editor or word processor to manage the document.