Recently I have been mulling over the possibility of commuting to New York—owing to a hazy future at my current employer. Whether or not I am ready to trudge there and back every day of the week is still an open question, but the siren song of the city has its draw.

With such a fine commute comes an interesting problem: one needs to cart lots of stuff to and from, especially a laptop and possibly a Kindle for the train ride, but no one wants to lug huge bags throughout the subways of Manhattan.

Anyway, here’s the article from Wired Magazine’s How-To Wiki on how to Travel Light Without Leaving Your Laptop Behind.

Got any ideas? It’s a Wiki, so go ahead and contribute yours.

One point that I don’t think they mention: I want a bag or backpack that looks nothing like a laptop bag. I really don’t care to walk around with a neon sign on my back saying “I’m carrying $3000 in electronics!”

I’m still looking for that perfect gruffy looking bag.

Imagine that you were to become temporarily incapacitated for whatever reason…

• Can a family member log in to your computer, as yourself, in order to access your files?
• Can your spouse access your online banking details so the bills can be paid?
• Can your family find your insurance information that you scanned and filed away?
• Is there someone who can log in to any online accounts that need care and feeding?

Not a pleasant subject, indeed, but one that worries me from time to time.

One way to address these needs is to keep all of your passwords and so forth in one special place, using a password safe application, and make sure someone else has the access code. For example, you can use a tool such as 1Password or SplashId to store hundreds of secret bits that you use all the time, and your family might need.

You might consider writing down the master passwords that control your life and sealing them in an envelope that you provide to a trusted family member. Since this is such a great security risk if found by the enemy, you might want to omit any identifying information from the note. Impress upon them the need to secure the document very well.

Perhaps you can choose the same master password with your spouse, with one relatively short password locking your computer and a long secure password locking your password safe application.

Regardless of how you address these issues, sit down with your better half (or trusted family member) and review where documents are and how to access them.

I trust my digital life to PDF. Almost everything I scan and most documents I write eventually end up squirreled away somewhere as PDF documents.

Have you ever considered just how portable those documents really are?

What’s wrong with PDF?

It seems strange to question the portability of these files, doesn’t it?

For the past ten or fifteen years Adobe has been providing Acrobat Reader and singing the wonders of their new universal document format. And it seemed to be all that, too—regardless of the audible groan we give when Acrobat launches after we click a link, isn’t it amazing that we can download press-ready copies of our income tax forms, that are guaranteed to look exactly the same when you print them as when I print them? Read on to see what dangers lurk within.

What’s the Problem?

In order to understand the nature of the PDF portability issues, one need only look as far as the web browser for an analogy. Consider how the web browser went from a barebones tool that could display a simple language, HTML, in a neutral way, fitting the web content onto each user’s screen, to a memory hogging behemoth that is an integral part of your operating system. It didn’t happen all at one; it has been death by a thousand cuts.

Mirroring the evolution of web browsers, the PDF document standard has adapted over the years to include many bells and whistles such as embedded audio, video, and JavaScript. It is these features that chip away at the core purpose and raison d’être of the PDF standard.

An example: Font Issues

A simple example of the weakness of these extended PDF features is the humble text font. When your application generates a PDF document, there is the option of using 14 standard PDF fonts, local machine fonts, or embedded TTF or Postscript fonts.

There are 14 standard fonts that should be available by default in each PDF reader. These fonts are Courier, Courier Bold, Courier Italic (Oblique), Courier Bold and Italic, Helvetica, Helvetica Bold, Helvetica Italic (Oblique), Helvetica Bold and Italic, Times Roman, Times Roman Bold, Times Roman Italic, Times Roman Bold and Italic, Symbol and ZapfDingBats® (source)

Guess what happens when you set your document in Mona Lisa Solid ITC and then print to PDF and send to all of your colleagues? Does your friend’s machine have a copy of this font? Maybe, and maybe not.

As I was writing this, I planned on putting together a cute demo by saving a document set in Mona Lisa Solid ITC in PDF from my Mac and then opening it on a PC. Much to my surprise (and delight), I found that the default “Print to PDF” functionality on my Mac does, in fact, embed the font within the document.

Regardless, if you have always just trusted that the fonts would be identical across platforms, you could get quite a surprise when your friend tries to print your beautiful document.

PDF/A Standard

Some time back, Adobe recognized the need for a more tightly controlled standard, for creating really portable documents, instead of mere portable documents. This standard, dating from 2005, is referred to as PDF/A, where the A stands for Archive.

A key element to … reproducibility is the requirement for PDF/A documents to be 100 % self-contained. All of the information necessary for displaying the document in the same manner every time is embedded in the file. This includes, but is not limited to, all content (text, raster images and vector graphics), fonts, and color information. A PDF/A document is not permitted to be reliant on information from external sources (e.g. font programs and hyperlinks). (Wikipedia)

Basically PDF/A forbids all of the flashy stuff and sticks to the basics: good solid document rendering.

Banned features include:

• Audio and Video
• JavaScript
• Encryption
• Nonstandard metadata
• Transparent images

In addition to the loss of several features, PDF/A documents can be somewhat larger, due to the embedded fonts, and they might have rendering issues with images that depend on transparency.

With all that, it still sounds like an enticing concept. Many PDF tools speak fluent PDF/A. Check out your own toolkit and see if you can future-proof your documents a little more

Here’s more on PDF/A documents

Long-term digital archiving with PDF/A (The PDF Blog)
PDF/A (Wikipedia)
PDF/A – A new Standard for Long-Term Archiving (PDF/A Competence Center)

I have always been a big fan of HowStuffWorks, with their detailed in-depth articles describing such disparate topics as manual transmissions and money laundering.

Anyway, author Diane Dannenfeldt has written a lengthy article on How Paperless Offices Work, giving ample coverage to myriad aspects of the topic:

• Introduction to How Paperless Offices Work
• Benefits of a Paperless Office
• Transitioning to a Paperless Office
• Managing Digital Documents
• Going Paperless at Home
• Paperless Office Solutions

Take a look at the full article here: How Paperless Offices Work (howstuffworks.com)

The basic tool required to bridge the gap between the carbon-intensive paper document present and the greener electronic document future was invented in 1993 as a way to streamline communications between publishers and printers.

Today, the humble PDF file is the file format of choice for “final” electronic documents. Properly created and deployed, PDF alone serves a critical need in reducing both business costs and environmental impacts.

Duff Johnson of Planet PDF wrote an article about two of my favorite topics: PDF Documents and Paperless Offices.

In the article, he discusses several key motivating factors for fitting PDF into your own workflow, with the underlying goal of making your office a little bit greener.

Read it all here: PDF is green tech for your office

Printing Documents

In a perfect paperless world we would never have need for dead trees. But that isn’t about to happen—there will always be a need to reprint certain important documents, and occasionally one may wish to print something for use away from a computer (e.g. a recipe).

Unless you want to print photo-quality Helvetica and Times Roman, you now are looking at using a traditional document printer, such as a laser printer or an inkjet printer. These days you may well have an all-in-one printer that combines a scanner with printer and fax.

The main problem I have with any of these printers is cost. Good laser printers are expensive and the cheap ones are just loss leaders to get you to spend $$$ on the toner cartridges. Worse still, those giveaway printers that come with new computers are the epitome of loss leaders—they make their profit on ink. Some have posited that the ink cartridge manufacturers have programmed their products to expire before the ink is exhausted.

Printing Online

For those who only have occasional print jobs, why not print your documents online?

For this article, I looked at two services: Staples Copy & Print and Fedex Office (the Copy Center Formerly Known as Kinkos). I selected these because they have a very large brick-and-mortar presence. Though you can have your documents mailed to you, you really want to go there and get them right now, don’t you?

As always, do a quick Google search to see the current lay of the landscape.

Staples

I started by going to the Staples Copy & Print web site.

Then I clicked on Create Copy Project. There was no need to log in at this point.

I was prompted to choose a local store; I entered my zip and clicked on a store.

After this, I provided a job name and quantity and started adding documents:

After a minute or so I had uploaded both my document on Creating a Basic NAS with Ubuntu Linux and my Secret Missile Plans (sorry, no link for that one!).

Staples supports printing several dozen different document types. Even though my missile plans appear to have a PDF icon below, you can rest assured that I uploaded a Microsoft Office .docx document.

The next step guided me through choosing options for each of my documents. There are plenty to choose from such as single-side/duplex, paper type, layout, folding, stapling, and so forth.

I chose some nice pink paper and set it to duplex.

Beware: The Color option was selected by default. I imagine this feature has earned them substantial $$$ from people who were just printing black and white documents. Sneaky.

Once my settings were all chosen, I was given an opportunity to review the print job before adding it to my shopping cart.

At this point I decided to spare a tree and I emptied my shopping cart.

Fedex Kinkos

The experience with Fedex Office was similar.

I started by going to the Fedex Office Print Online website.

Like Staples, I went through the process of uploading my documents and choosing options.

Beware: Again, the Color option was chosen by default. Make sure you choose B&W if you are printing black and white.

Here is the preview of my Linux document:

How was the Price?

With my basic settings, printing 38 total pages in full duplex, Staples was fairly cheap, coming in at just under $3.00, while Fedex came in about a dollar more.

These prices reflect a per-page cost of between 8 and 12 cents. This is not bad at all, considering I don’t need my own printer!

Note that the different features you choose are à la carte, adding little bits to the cost. If you think the price seems a little high, go and fiddle around with the options you selected.

Beware of that color copy trap. Shame on both Fedex and Staples for making color the default! I suspect that they may have consulted some of those ink cartridge guys for their business model.

The Fedex site openly references a Volume Discount, and it is likely that Staples would have something similar.

One More Option: Sneakernet!

One final technique that I have not mentioned until now is good old-fashioned Sneakernet. You can always put your documents on a thumb drive and stop by your favorite office center and ask them to print them. You will pay similar fees to their per-copy charges. Not bad, especially if you want them to use high quality paper and a top-notch laser printer.

And don’t forget that Sneakernet works as well for photos. Many chain pharmacies and supermarkets have a carry-in photo printing service. Just bring in a thumb drive or a SD card with your photos on it and they can print them for you. It won’t be as cheap as Winkflash, but it’s still a better deal than the old days.

Use common sense here. If you are handing over an SD card that has the only copy of your photos on it, you should probably use your thumbnail to flick the little “read-only” lever on the card.

Summary

In these two articles I have provided several options for handling photo printing and document printing, online or in the store, without ever having to curse at another printer again. I hope that you are able to find something useful here. If you have any advice or feedback on different print services, let me know!

If you are looking for step-by-step checklists and good solid advice about putting your digital life in order, then this book is for you.

The author covers a very broad swath of digital media, discussing topics such as video, music, and photography. She provides clear guidelines for prioritizing your efforts and crisp checklists.

In addition, this up-to-date book (January 2009) provides a good source of information about the leading software products available, with advice on features to look for. For example, while discussing photo management software, she mentioned the advantage of being able to select a large group of photographs and batch-rename them to something like “Egypt 001.jpg” through “Egypt 100.jpg”

The book gets geeky enough to whet the palate, without going too far. Topics such as EXIF data and nitty gritty settings for scanning photos are covered in depth.

Here’s the book on Amazon

On my last birthday, I received one of the coolest cards from the kids. It was one of those cute cards that people give that are “from the cat.” In this case, however, they had chased down each one of our felines and subjected them to a forced paw-printing exercise, which you can see at the right, complete with each cat’s name.

Now that’s just too cute for words. Who can imagine ever throwing out such a neat card?

How about the card that my wife slipped in my luggage last October when I went to India on business? That really warmed my heart to read while I was unpacking my luggage in a Bangalore hotel. That one’s a keeper too.

The problem is not one individual card; as the saying goes, “No single snowflake feels responsible for the avalanche.”

Besides the sentimental value, quite often cards hold important information: names and addresses. In the treeware world, people have been saving the corners of envelopes for years in an effort to keep the important bits while tossing the rest.

You know where this is going, don’t you?

Scan it all in

Once you have accepted the fact that you have never actually sat down with your shoebox to read twenty years of cards, and that no one will be hurt at their loss, you can calmly sit down and begin scanning them in, so that you always remember them.

I found that a sheet-fed scanner works wonders, but I often have to snip on the fold lines and feed in the individual pieces, assembling the whole lot into a multi-page PDF when I’m done.

Some kinds of cards just don’t work in a sheet-fed scanner: lumpy cards covered in glitter with popups and stuff. I use my flatbed scanner for those.

No matter how I do it, I make sure that in the end I have a single PDF that contains the whole card, and no blank pages. I try to make the pretty part of the card be the first page, so in any thumbnail view I will see the card.

If the envelope has useful information, such as a return address, just scan it in as well and attach it as another page to the PDF.

Make sure to pick a good name for the file; I choose to use the date of the event followed by the type of card and maybe some special info about the event. Such as 20081225 Christmas card from Mom.pdf. That’s unambiguous and can be found regardless of what kind of document management system you use (if any).

Not just greeting cards

I’m certain that your shoebox has other flat paper items that aren’t greeting cards. Some are letters that you exchanged with your spouse when you were dating, perhaps others are letters from distant family members. Maybe someone sent you a copy of a photo of the eight of you on that fun rafting trip back in ’92. The point is, you can go through all of this and handle it accordingly:

• Set aside anything that must be kept—things like stray automotive titles and precious letters from deceased family members.
• Scan in all the rest, creating PDF files that contain exactly one letter, in its entirety, with envelope.
• Don’t bother running OCR on it unless it is typewritten or the address is a printed label.
• You may wish to scan in any photos at higher resolution in your photo management software (such as iPhoto or Picasa).

Once you have everything checked and safely backed up, you can recycle all of that paper and use the shoebox for something useful like network cables and power supplies.

When you are all done, you will have plenty of beautiful memories on your computer (and backed up!) that you can.

[Update]

Last weekend, a friend mentioned that her mom taught her to always keep the most recent letter from a family member. This way, if the person dies, you will have the last letter they sent to you.

She still has the last letter her mother wrote before she passed away.

The message is clear: Don’t be a fool. Keep precious letters that have great sentimental value. You probably do want to scan them in, so that even if they are lost in a fire, you still have the scan.

But think very carefully before taking anything to the shredder.

I just took a look at a product called GreenPrint that helps you print exactly the pages you want and skip the junk with little effort.

There are many times when you still need a printout, such as when printing driving directions, but by using this tool you can cut out a third of the sheets you generate.

(This was one of the items on Julie Urlaub’s 19 Tips to go Paperless at Home)

Here’s how it works

GreenPrint installs itself as a new printer on your machine—sort of a virtual printer, similar to products such as Adobe Distiller and PDF Creator.

Just select the GreenPrint printer from the printer dialog and print to it as if it were an ordinary printer. You probably will want to make it your default printer.

The GreenPrint tool then gives you a preview of the print job and shows you what parts of your document it thinks are junk.

For example, I printed this web site:

All of the pages that are in red will be suppressed. You can see here that the very last page was automatically flagged as junk because it only has a line or two of text.

I noticed that the second-to-last page was just the page navigation bar, a fairly useless thing to print, so I double-clicked sheet 6 to exclude it.

You can change whether a sheet is included or excluded by double-clicking it. When you are ready, just click Print in the top-left corner.

Other features

The product provides print-to-PDF capability, an always-welcome feature for the paperless warrior. You can also select destination printers from the dropdown box in the top-right corner and modify the view.

You can also turn off images on any page. For example, if you are printing mainly text, and there are a dozen advertisements on the page, just turn them off with a click.

Free and Paid versions available

The version I tested is GreenPrint World, available for free for Win2K/XP/Vista. This version is supported by ads (in the right bar).

They offer a payware version called GreenPrint Home Premium, and there is a Mac version called GreenPrint Mac. Both versions cost $29.

The difference between the two is that the paid version has no ads and claims the dubious “feature” of quick loading preview, which gives one the feel that they slipped an intentional secret delay in the free version, which you pay to remove.

I like products that do one thing very well, and this appears to be one of them. I usually don’t bother using ad-supported versions, preferring ad-free use and the warm fuzzy feeling one gets from buying a license.

Of course, if they offered a $39 “Family” license that would allow me to install PrintGreen on multiple Macs and PCs in my house, I would buy it in a New York minute!

Here’s an interesting list of general greenness, reducing the total amount of paper in the home:

19 Tips to go Paperless at Home

I like the ideas in Julie’s list because several of them work towards cutting paper off at the source, such as committing to all-online banking and using ebooks instead of dead-tree versions.