Linn's Stamp News Digital Edition

Now that I have checked out Mekeel and what they have to offer digitally, I find Linn's digital solution lacking. I emailed Amos and asked if they were going to allow us to get downloadable PDFs of Linn's any time soon.

The reply I just got back said:




For me, that truly is disappointing. My current solution is to print to PDF and then read on my Nexus 10. This poses three problems for me:

1. I need to use a PC in order create the PDF instead of just clicking on a link to download it.
2. The PDF is HUGE. A monthly issue can be well over 100 MB in size
3. Each page is a picture and not actual text, so when I zoom in, the text gets all grainy.

So, because I am a geek, I deciced to do some digging...

Amos uses matterCast as it's digital solution. Says so right in the bottom left of Linns.com. So, I figure, maybe there's a newer version of matterCast available with this option and they're just being cheap.

Well... looks like matterCast may be no more. If you go to mattercast.com, you get a generic landing page for cheap asp hosting. So, Linn's may be between a rock and hard place...

I wish I could just go into the Google Play store, iOS App Store, or Kindle store and just subscribe to the magazine...

Zinio seems to be the leader in this area. Can't say I'm a big fan, but they do have cross-platform solutions.

I like the solution Mekeel has. Right in the menu: Download a PDF.

Hi apastuszak

Download this product. I have been using it for a number of years now and it does a great job. It installs as a printer. To create a PDF one just selects it as the "printer of choice". When "printing" is complete a dialog opens and you can save the results which is a PDF file.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

I just "printed" the first 8 pages of the May 6 issue and it did a great job of creating a PDF. The size after all was done was just 2.64M

Jerry B

There are several solutions like Jerry's.

I've adopted BullZIP as my favorite http://www.bullzip.com/

There are other useful tools besides the PDF Printer

KS

I think Google Chrome (at least the Windows version) also comes with PDF-creation capability built in. I found it worked better (more nicely formatted output) than a couple of the 3rd-party add-ins I tried out in Firefox. I tested them with Linn's specifically in mind.

-- Dave

I tested three different PDF solutions and PDFCreator creates the smallest file from the May 6 edition:

PDFCreator - 19 MB
Google Chrome - 104 MB
PDF995 - 38 MB