Nelson's Blog: Useful Tech for Political Scientists: Document Readers Part One

Nelson's Blog: Useful Tech for Political Scientists

I tend to find many ways to "usefully" avoid working on my dissertation. But one thing I seem to do a lot is to think about ways I can get computers to do my work for me. Total success still eludes me but I thought I would start sharing what I have learned along the way. Topics in this blog should especially appeal to social science researchers but may appeal to geeks of other persuasions as well. UPDATED WEEKLY (sort of).

Tuesday, March 21, 2006

Document Readers Part One

Reading Documents on Your Windows PC – Part One

An important part of having a paperless office is having the ability to read documents in their digital form. Preferably, you want to be able to highlight and annotate them just as you would a paper copy.

So in this post I want to review some of the software solutions that I have tried. All of these programs can also be used with a Pocket PC, although Adobe Acrobat for Pocket PC is read-only.

Cerience Repligo

Microsoft Reader

Mobipocket

Adobe Acrobat

I will use the following criteria in my posts:

File formats. Can I use the software to read (for example) .pdf, .doc, and various versions of webpages? [the most important here is the ability to read .pdf files]