editing

Draft Important Emails In Your Word Processor

12:00PM Angus Kidman | Revising email can definitely lead to better communication, but how do you develop the revision habit? My own solution is pretty simple: compose important mails in a word processor rather than in the email software itself. More »

Revise An Email So People Will Actually Read It

7:00AM Adam Pash | Yesterday you shared your worst email gaffes, and regardless of the situation, they almost all share one commonality: They could have been prevented. More »

PDFVue Edits PDF Text And Images Online

9:15PM Kevin Purdy | Free and fairly full-featured editor PDFVue isn’t the only webapp that can fill out PDF forms online, but it lets anyone add images, sticky notes, links, shapes, and more to forms and documents. You can head to PDFVue and upload your files for editing online, or install a Firefox extension to have the webapp be your automatic PDF handler—not necessarily a speed move, because the webapp has to download and customise anything you were taking a glance at. The editing tools are, however, pretty unique amongst PDFVue’s brethren we’ve sampled before, like PDFMeNot and PDFHammer (what’s with the fear of spacing, PDF app makers?) You get a standard range of colours to create lines, circles, text, and sticky notes with, and can upload images for branding or other purposes. The right-hand Forms tab gives you the ability to create check boxes, bullet lists, and other input data on PDFs that might otherwise seem a text-only affair. It’s doubtful one would make PDFVue your full-time PDF client, but for filling out forms, hacking up a presentation, or otherwise tweaking your read-only docs, it’s not a bad solution. PDFVue [via Webware] More »

Add Subtitles To Any Movie Or Television Show

11:30PM Jason Fitzpatrick | Windows only: If you’ve wanted to put the subtitles for a video directly into its own file for maximum compatibility across players and platforms, VirtualDub and VobSub will help you merge the two. Why would you want to embed your subtitles, when almost all popular media players—like the ever-useful VLC—will load subtitles along with the master video file? Smaller media devices like the iPhone and PSP won’t recognise subtitles, and burning your subtitles to a disc for playback in DVD players is an absolute crap shoot of compatibility. If the subtitles are part of the video file itself, they can be displayed on any device that can display the video. Simon at technology blog MakeUseOf has put together a step-by-step tutorial on using the free programs VirtualDub and VobSub to embed subtitles into video files. If you don’t already have the screen text for your video, make sure to check out Sublight (Windows) and Subdownloader (cross platform), which we’ve recommended for searching and matching subtitles. VobSub uses the VirtualDub engine the same way as the previously reviewed DiVXLand Media Subtitler, although the interface on VobSub is slightly more user friendly. The entire process outlined below involves a re-encode of the video file and is quite CPU intensive, so expect the process to be nearly real time—a two hour movie takes roughly two hours to embed with subtitles. Hit the link below for the full native subtitle lesson. Photo by WorldIslandInfo. How to Add Subtitles to a Movie or Television Series [MakeUseOf] More »