It can be really irritating when you want to edit a document but find you have lost the original word document and only have a PDF. Most of the time you can extract the text from a PDF but this can be time consuming and it often needs to be reformatted. I found a useful post on askowen the other day that deals with the problem and offers several possible free solutions. One of which involves filling in an online form at freepdfconvert which takes a couple of minutes. It does however, only support documents that are up to 2 pages long and also requires you to know the password if the PDF is password protected,

When you are sending an Illustrator file to the printers it is usually best to convert the fonts to outlines. This means that even if the person you are sending the file does not have the fonts you have used installed they will still be able to print it. When you convert fonts to outlines, the program will look at the fonts as images rather than text thus fixing any upload errors that result when fonts are not embedded in your file.

Here is how to convert fonts to outlines in Adobe Illustrator
Select all text.
Click Type Menu> Type> Create Outlines
Text now has a blue outline.
Save a copy and re-upload.

While working on my Mac mini the other day I encountered an easily fixed but very irritating problem. When I tried to load my creative suite programs (Photoshop CS, Illustrator, In Design etc) they all failed to load. Instead they got to the stage where they were initializing and then just hung. After reloading creative suite and many hours of frustrating research trawling through forums looking for a solution I finally found an off the wall fix. Apparently if you change the time zone in the Macs settings and then restart the computer everything will work. I must admit to being very sceptical about whether this would solve my problem but after nearly 3 hours of trying to fix the problem I was on the verge of throwing my Mac out of the window. So try it I did. After changing the time zone from London to Dublin, restarting the computer and then changing it back to London again everything was back to normal and Creative Suite worked as usual.