Information Connection, 0417 WYBJ, Vol. 40 No. 2. 46
| Author | Tawnya Plumb, George W. Hopper Law Library Laramie, Wyoming |
A Day in the Life of Wyoming PDF Files
Tawnya Plumb, George W. Hopper Law Library Laramie, Wyoming
One morning an attorney visited the public law library in Laramie to do some research. While Westlaw and Bloomberg Law were freely available at a computer workstation, the attorney needed to research in some print materials that were not available online. Research was performed and books were fagged for copying. Rather than taking the print books to the photocopier, however, this tech savvy attorney pulled up the free Cam Scanner app and took pictures of fagged pages using a smartphone. Cam Scanner conveniently saved these images as clean, single or multi-page PDFs that could be saved to the cloud, emailed, or shared with others for commenting. A passenger on the drive back to Cheyenne, this attorney then used the free Xodo PDF Pro app to annotate the PDFs by adding comments, highlights, arrows, underlines, strikeouts, and bookmarks, making the most of the travel time.
Around lunch-time, an attorney up in Sheridan received a lengthy brief to review and edit. The brief was sent as a PDF file, not a text file, and the sender took of into the woods on vacation before an alternative version could be requested. The attorney brainstormed ways to edit the PDF on a computer. The first plan of attack was to open the PDF file within Word and convert it (File > Open > OK to conversion). This process works okay, but often Word does not recognize special characters and removes formatting. The converted document tends to need a lot of editing and proofreading, which are timely tasks. A colleague suggested using Adobe Acrobat Pro, a reasonably priced software product that allows for the conversion, editing, and manipulation of PDF files. The colleague explained that the software works well for making minor text edits and inserting and removing PDF pages but is burdensome when trying to alter pages of text. After learning more about the product, the attorney relied on the improved conversion capabilities of Adobe Acrobat Pro and spent less time editing the converted document.
That afternoon in Teton County, an attorney was trying to pull large amounts of statistical data from a cumbersome website to create an Excel spreadsheet. Rather than copying and pasting data, the attorney used a PDF workaround. The attorney knew that...
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