Re: pdf files

[Leigh Palmer <palmer@sfu.ca>]

> Wiley publishing has supplied us with solutions to the Halliday,
> Resnick and Walker problems in the form of pdf files. We would like to
> post selected solutions on the Web (local access only) for our
> students, but have run into two problems: The font they chose is
> virtually unreadable on screen (Mac or Unix); It seems that pdf files
> cannot be edited, only viewed or printed page-wise.
>
> Does anyone know of a way to convert pdf to something editable and
> then back to pdf for display? Any alternative approaches? (I tried
> scanning, but the resulting gif files print slowly and badly, at
> best.)

You need Adobe Acrobat Exchange. An academic edition exists (mine cost
me C$54, cheap) and I still don't quite know how to use it, but it has
the capability you want, unless Wiley has succeeded in locking the
documents somehow. It should be a good exercise for one of your students
to defeat the lock if so.

I'm very interested in any fix you come up with. This problem bugs me
constantly (I use a Mac) in other places. The Los Alamos preprint
archive used to have the problem, but they provided a fix. Now my magic
cookie tells the preprint server that I am a Mac user and everything
comes to me in the proper fonts. Thus a solution exists if only the
publisher is made aware of the problem. I think you should contact
Wiley and let them know the problem exists and is likely to be
widespread. They don't want anyone hacking their solution manual, I
assure you, and they should be receptive to your desires.

Leigh