How to set Foxit Reader to always launch PDFs in ‘magazine mode’

I’ve finally found a decent PDF reader, for speedily launching straight into full-screen, double-page spread + cover page. It’s the free Foxit Reader, set thus…

1. Set it to always launch “Full Screen Mode”, in Preferences…

2. Set to always launch with “facing pages” and “fit page”, in Preferences…

While you’re in Preferences…

* uncheck “Show Advertisment” in General. (To prevent future updates forcing advertising on you, also uncheck “auto-update”).
* uncheck “Enable Javascript” in Trust Manager (doing this increases your security).
* you probably also want to enable clickable Web links in PDFs. This is hidden deep in: Preferences | Trust Manager | Internet Access from PDF files… | Change Settings | “Allow PDF files to access all web sites” | OK | OK.

3. Set View to use double-page spread + cover page. Close and reopen the software, and the cover-page setting will hopefully “stick”…

As you can see from all the wrangling shown above, Foxit still needs a one-click settings button marked: “Always launch a PDF straight into magazine mode (fullscreen + facing pages + show cover page + fit page)”.

Tapping “Esc” on the keyboard will escape you from fullscreen.

Foxit is very fast to launch on 64-bit Windows 8, only a few milliseconds slower than the almost instantaneous Microsoft Reader. But unlike Microsoft Reader it always shows crisp text. And you get access to the page thumbnails.

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The alternatives:

Microsoft Reader for Windows 8: Lovely speed, simple interface. But the awesome launch / page-turn speed comes at a price: the page often looks fuzzy, which makes reading small text unpleasant. No page thumbnails support, either.

Firefox browser: A very capable and fast integrated PDF reader for use during Web browsing, with an intuitive user interface. But it can’t remember user settings between sessions, and doesn’t respect any “display as double page spreads” settings embedded in the PDF. Copying and pasting text from such a PDF display sometimes shows garbled text, so Firefox may be compromising letter fidelity in order to get a good visual display.

Nitro PDF Reader: Not that bad, I had it on my system for a few weeks. But it can’t launch straight to fullscreen, while Foxit Reader can. Foxit also has the nicer user interface. Its PDF writer seems to find it impossible to print s 500-page + document without crashing the print spooler. Other PDF writers are fine.

Adobe Reader: Ugh… Clunky user interface, and a proven and persistent security risk. Plus, that nasty new “visit links to Adobe!” sidebar that’s impossible to remove. Uninstalled.

Slim PDF Reader: Installed. Very lightweight, free, but meh… it was rapidly uninstalled.

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Update, September 2017: It’s goodbye to Foxit, which added one to many nags, extra bits of unwanted software such as its Connected module, and generally got bloated.

I’m now using the freeware Sumatra PDF, with its Book view (Cover + Facing pages) which is found under Settings | View | Book View. Super-quick launch and very smooth page-turn.

You can set it to always launch in Book mode by editing the Advanced settings list. Find:

DefaultDisplayMode = automatic

and change this to…

DefaultDisplayMode = book view

The other initial drawback appears to be a slight sliver of gutter between double-page spreads, which spoils magazine spreads in art / architecture / fashion etc magazines. This can also be fixed in the Advanced settings. Find:

PageSpacing = 4 4

and change this to…

PageSpacing = 0 0

Academic Torrents

Got Big Data? Need to offer really fast download for that? Academic Torrents is built on BitTorrent, a new… “community-maintained distributed repository for datasets and scientific knowledge”.

Also look at Terasaur from iBiblio, up to 2Tb of free space + torrent distribution, for hosting files too big for regular archiving services.

Academic Book of The Future, 10th Feb 2014, London

The Academic Book of The Future, another in the seemingly never-ending train of £500k two-year AHRC research projects, launches at The British Library on 10th February 2014. Grants of up to £450,000 are on offer.

Google Scholar and DSpace

A new study, “Google Scholar and DSpace”…

“The average indexing ratio [in Google Scholar] for our sample of 10 recent DSpace repositories is 64.8%”

I wonder if the interface presentation has an influence? http://circle.ubc.ca/ is totally hardcore in presentation and keywording, and is indexed at 99%. Whereas http://dash.harvard.edu/ has a more student-friendly blog-like look and feel to it, and is indexed at just 26% despite the harvard.edu domain. But perhaps not, as I guess its more likely due to the presence or otherwise of good machine-readable metadata.

Radio search engine

Cool new Radio search engine. Indexes 400,000 radio station streams in real-time, tags artist metadata to the songs they’re streaming, then lets you search and load those streams. Works fine, and is an excellent method of discovering online radio stations playing artists you like. Would be great to see this technology extended to intelligent speech radio and intellectual podcasts. It serves as a sort of podcast-and-BBC search at present, but my search for “economy” showed it to give very poor results when it strays outside of music.

Blogs begone

Just when blogs were making a comeback, after the inane collective Twitter-gasm of the last few years… today Google has removed “Blogs” from the switch-through options at the top of the Google Search results …

They’ve also recently made some pointed comments to bloggers about allowing spammy “guest bloggers” to use their blogs.

ROAD

ROAD is a new unified ISSN lookup tool, apparently from UNESCO, drawing records from a handful of big databases. What makes it notable is that search results only show records of open access titles. ROAD looks like it might be useful for finding out what’s currently listed where, e.g.: what open access title is in Scopus but is not yet in the DOAJ. ROAD also gives ISSN records that are otherwise held behind paywalls, in databases such as ISSN Register (with which ROAD appears to be associated).

Drilling down through the sidebar filters shows ROAD listing only 338 titles in the Arts and Humanities + published in English, despite its accessing the DOAJ and many other databases. Odd.

OAN

I found a German search-engine for material in repositories, OAN. The precision of its single-box keyword search is very poor, at least when using the English language. But OAN does have the ability to filter down to records for periodical articles only, and then to filter these records again by broad subject area. OAN also seems to have made a very strong effort to only include repository records that actually lead to full-text.

Identify and extract duplicates in an Excel 2007 column list

Identify and extract the duplicates in an Excel 2007 column list. It should be a simple one-button task, but Microsoft expects users to jump through hoops to do it. To the rescue: the free Duplicate Master 1.4, which deftly handles the task with a simple four-click wizard…

1. Download Duplicate Master and extract.
2. Double-click on The Duplicate Master.xla file, and accept Excel’s warning about ‘enabling macros’. Duplicate Master should load into Excel, to be found in the Add-Ins tab.

3. Load your .xls and select your column of data.
4. Call up Duplicate Master, and select your options in it…

Duplicate Master then copies your column’s duplicate entries, automatically opens a new sheet, and copies in the duplicates.

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For future use, either:

1. Make a desktop shortcut to The Duplicate Master.xla, put it in the Windows Start menu, and then call as it up as if it were a program when you have Excel loaded.

or… 2. Pin Duplicate Master to the Add-ins tab by following these steps: Open the Excel 2007 Start Orb | Excel Options | Add-ins | Managed Excel Add-ins + GO | Browse… load The Duplicate Master.xla | OK, OK, and quit.

Report from the UKSG One-Day Conference, Nov 2013

A frank summary report of a recent open access event in the UK…

“The publisher-led proposal [apparently in a very limited trial] to offer walk-in access in UK public libraries to a majority of [their commercial database] journals was also dismissed as ‘lip-service’, an experiment intended to fail in order to show that there was ‘no demand’ for wider access.”

There’s also a question of how that idea would work in practice, if it was ever rolled out to all UK public libraries. Assuming password-controlled home access to the service is not allowed for library members (like it is for accessing NewsUK and other publication databases), then how many PCs in the library would be equipped to offer the service? All of them? Would the public be allowed to save their accessed PDFs to a memory stick or cloud storage, and walk out? If so, how many PDFs on each visit? If only paper print-outs of articles were allowed, at current public library costs of say 6 to 8 pence per sheet, an average long humanities article might carry a printing cost of perhaps £1.60 to £2.50. Would publishers be able to claim a cut of that printing charge, perhaps even inflating the cost in such instances to 10p or 12p per printed sheet in order to boost their cut? I wonder if such apparently ‘free’ access, in the hands of the major paywall publishers, might actually end up costing library users £4 or £5 per article — in terms of users being able to take articles home for close study and contemplation.