There is a downside which is common to most tools available for converting PDF to editable text format. Google Docs and many other programs use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract text from images and pdf files. Now lets suppose you have PDF with text in Hebrew or someother language there is a good chance that OSR technique might not work. However you should still give it a try.

Google Docs
I use Google Docs as my office suite and Google docs can convert PDF files to editable text format. After logging into your Google Docs account click on the upload button. On the upload screen select the pdf file you want to upload and then check the box that says “Convert text from PDF or image files to Google Docs documents”. Start upload and then click on the uploaded file to open it in Google Docs. Remember you may loose some or all the formatting that original PDF file had.

Nitro PDF format to Word or RTF
Nitro PDF to Word is an online tool which claims to be the most accurate PDF to word converter. You simply select the file to upload provide your email address and uncheck the box that says “Receive PDF to Word news from Nitro” or else you will start recieving emails from Nitro software about their products and services.

Open Office
Open Office has built in PDF export feature which allows you to export files created with Open Office to be saved as PDF. Installing Sun PDF Import extension you can also import PDF files to Open Office, edit them and save them in different formats. This method has provided the best results for me. Open Office with this extension tries to import not just the text but also the images and layout of the PDF file.

As I said earlier that most tools will not be able to preserve the original formating and layout of the PDF file. Also note that even though OCR works accurately for most languages using Latin characters, still it is advised that you check the results for spelling mistakes.

Open Clip Art

Try Open Clip Art for all your clip art needs. It has whole wealth of Clip Art organized in tags and most of these images are in Public Domain which allows you to reuse them anywhere you want. You can even download the entire Open Clip Art collection to your hard disk in svg and png formats. See how you can integrate Open Clip Art with Open Office or use it with Microsoft Office Applications. Some files at Open Clip Art may not be available in png format you can still download the SVG file and convert it using free and open source tools such as Inkscape or the Gimp. You can also use these images on Google Docs and Google Sites too. But please do not link directly to the image file on Open Clip Art’s server. Instead download the png file to your hard disk and then upload it to your document.

Flickr

Try Flickr’s Advanced Search to look for images, pictures, photographs, drawings and other art work that are released under a creative commons license that allows you to redistribute or build your work upon them. This license is called Creative Commons Attribute. You will be surprised to see how much high quality content is available for you to re-use.

Remember using someone else’s work without their permission is not just bad manners but it is also copyright infringement. Most people on the web do not mind sharing their work, after all thats why they publish it on the web in the first place. Instead of stealing someone’s work it would be much better if you ask them politely to use their work on your website or document. Don’t forget to mention that you will give them the credit for the work.

I write short stories for children in Urdu language. In order to use Google Docs with Urdu, I need Urdu fonts and I also need to adjust text direction and alignment. Currently these features are not available from the menu. But editing the CSS, one can write not only in Urdu but any language and use any fonts. Here is how I do that:

Open your document and go to Edit > Edit CSS

The CSS Editor will appear on screen. I write CSS to set fonts and text direction for the entire document:


body {
direction: rtl;
text-align: right;
font-family: "Nafees Web Naskh","Urdu Naskh Asiatype",Tahoma,sans-serif;
font-size: 16px;
}


The first line of this peice of code defines the body which means that the rules described below are for the entire document. Curly bracket marks the beginning of the rules. Direction attribute makes the text direction right to left. Rest is self explanatory. You can change this to meet your needs.

If you just want to change the direction of the text. Go to Edit > Document styles and check the box that says ” Make the page text align right-to-left.”

Now there is a problem with these documents. If you have described a font not listed in the menu of Google Docs, and you download the file as PDF then you wont be able to see PDF document in your own font. Why? because in order to generate a PDF with the font described in the style sheet the font should be available to the PDF creator. In this case the font is stored on your computer not on Google. So how do we resolve this issue? Since I use Ubuntu so download my Google Docs file and open it with Open Office to create a PDF file. It works like a charm and OpenOffice’s PDF are beautiful and smaller in size. But if you don’t want to download and install open office then you can always use PDFCreator.

Google sites is simple but full of features to meet all your needs. You can add almost anything to your website by using it with other Google web applications. All these great features are available to you under the Insert menu when you edit a page.

Add Pictures
There is a handy button to upload your pictures. But you can also add pictures from Picassa web albums. This feature is particularly good if you want to publish albums of your products, your business, events, and so on. Using albums will provide your visitors a reason to stay, browse, and would eventually compell to take action and contact you.

Add Videos
You can upload your videos to Google Video or YouTube and then embedd them on any page on your website. If a picture is worth a thousand words than a video is better than thousand pictures. You can use your handycam to make video and upload them to Youtube. Just make sure that your videos are not too lengthy. Make short clips and make sure that they are good. You can always edit your videos with Windows Movie Maker. Add music to them, add subtitles, slides, or logos.

Add Documents, Spreadsheets, Presentations
You can embedd your documents from Google Docs to your website. Even if you use MS Word or Open Office, you can always upload your documents to Google docs just for the sharing purposes. I specially love the presentations feature. I think it is a great idea to create promotional material in slides and add them to your pages or offer them as downloads so that visitors can learn more about your business by viewing a colorful presentation.

Add Forms
People are lazy, and with the wealth of information available on the web it is difficult for them to memorize your site and your business details. They are lazy to pick up the phone and dial your number. So it is a good idea that you add forms to your site so that they can leave their contact information and you can tell them more about your business, products and services. You can create a contact page with a form on Google Sites. First create a form in Google Docs then add it to your page. It is hassle free and you don’t need to know any programing, scripting or html to do that. You can place an order /query form, run a poll on your website and ask visitors questions. Run surveys and display the data on your pages.

Add Google Gadget
Click on the More button under the Insert menu and you can choose from hundereds of gadgets to add interactivity and usefulness to your website. You can add translate tools, you can add calendars, add an online chat gadget to talk to your site’s visitors. Browse the gadgets and you will be surprised to see how many tools are there to make your site interesting. But a word of caution, don’t use too many gadgets and don’t use them at all if you don’t need them. They are available to add interactivity and external functionality to your website. Using them un-neccarily would be annoying for your site’s user experience.

There is nothing to worry about if you ever run into any problem while working on your website at Google Sites. They have support available for you. You can browse their help pages, join their forum and post your questions, or you can subscribe to their Google sites blog. They often feature websites that are taken advantage Google Sites, so drop them an email and they might even feature you on their blog.

There are thousands of small business owners who don’t know how they can benefit from the web. They do not have the skills, and their budget does not allow them to hire professionals for the job. In this post we will discuss how small businesses can take advantage of the web by creating simple small website with all the functionality of big websites. We will be using Google Sites, which is a part of the web based application suit called “Google Apps”. With Google sites you can create professional looking websites witout any knowledge of HTML.

1. Sign up for Google Sites and press the Create site button.
2. Now you will be shown a form where you can provide information about your new website.
3. In the site name field you can use your business name example “Bashir’s Pet Shop”.
4. In the description field describe your business example “We supply pet food, accessories for your dogs, cats, birds and fish”.
5. Make sure that the Mature Content box is unchecked.
6. Share with: “Every one in the world can view this site”.
7. Select a theme for your website. You can change it later if you want to.
8. Type the code shown and press the Create site button.

Now Google will create a site for you with a page called Home and you will be taken to an interface where you can create new pages and edit old pages. Press the Edit Page button to edit your Home page and fill it with information about your site. Using this interface is like using a Word processor. You can insert pictures, create tables, link to other pages, and write as much as you want. This is your site’s main page so it would be better if you describe the services and products your business offers in simple words. You can create new pages for each service or product afterwards. Press the Save button.

Congratulations! You have created yourself a website with a home page. But there should be other pages in this website, or else it would look boring. So you add a new page by pressing “Create new page” button. There are different kind of pages you can create. A simple web page good for text that you don’t need to change very often, for e.g. a “Contact” page with information about your business’s location, phone number and email address. Google Sites also has a feature called “Announcements”. Using it you can create a page where you can post latest updates and news about your small business. You can also create a “List” page or a file cabinet page.

Once you have created a few pages that effeciently describe your business. Click on “Edit Sidebar” under your sidebar on bottom left corner. Here you can change your sidebar, we recommend that you change your Navigation so that it shows all your pages.

We have created a Sample site for you. Look how we have changed the sidebar. We have added pages to navigation. One of these pages “Recently” contains announcements, “Price List” page has a list of prices of items sold, we have added a contact page too.

Using Google Sites you can create an almost perfect looking website. However there is a problem. Your site’s URL would be something like this: http://sites.google.com/site/yoursitename This is not a very professional looking address for a good and reliable business like yours. But don’t worry, You can use Google sites with your own domain name. For that you first need a domain name. You can register a domain name from popular sites such as GoDaddy or NetworkSolutions. You don’t need to buy hosting since your site is already hosted on Google servers. After you have registered your domain name, go back to your Google Sites control panel open your site and on top right you will see Site Settings link. Click on it and go to Web Address tab. Now under the Add a web address write down your domain name e.g. www.example.com. Now remember that you must own the domain and have access to change the CNAME records. Read this page from Google Sites support for information on how to set your domain name to work with Google sites.

If this sounds difficult to you, then you can try Dream Host, which offers webhosting and domain name registration services for as low as $6.99 per month. They also offer you to enable Google Apps by default when signing up for their service. Using Google Apps with your own domain. This way you can not only create a wonderful website using Google Sites, you can also use gmail, Google Docs, and many other wonderful google applications with your own domain name. It also gives you the power to add new users who can work on pages, this way you can add your staff and colleagues to update website. We recommend Dreamhost because this website is hosted on Dream host too and we think that they are very reliable webhost for newbies.

After you have created your wonderful website for your soon-going-to-be-big small business, there are other things that you can do with your website. Things that will make visitors come again and again to your website. For example you can create a mailing list for your website using Google Groups, and then add a subscribe option on your sidebar. This way you can send newsletter to your sites visitors and customers. You can track visitors using Google Analytics, Promote your website using Google Adwords, Add videos to your website from Youtube, Add contact forms, survey and polls using Google Docs Forms, The sky is the limit when it comes to what you can do with your small website.
Please let us know if you found this guide useful and tell us about the sites you have created using Google Sites.

Spam Protection and Human Identification features
Even though the form is there and working properly as it should be but there is a risk that some mean people may try to misuse this form by sending spam messages using spambots. As I said we are not some big name so we wont get much emails at least for now but what if some website with lots of visitors want to use these forms on their webpages. Or what if someone wants to use the forms to collect the user submitted data and publish it right away? In this case these users will need some anti-spam tool to combat with invalid form submissions. I posted this question on Google Docs forum as well, and it seems like many other people has already expressed their concern on this issue.

Styling the forms
Some web designers and website owners use CSS to give a look and feel to their forms. They use these design rules in their search form, comments area and mailing list forms. So it would be nice if they had someway to change the appearance of the forms so that they look pretty and fit seemlessly in their webpages.

HTML in description field
I wanted to add a bulleted list and a link in my description field. But unfortunately Google Docs form wraps description field in <pre> tag so HTML appeared as it is in the form. I can not understand why the description field is wraped in pre tags and why not allow basic HTML there?

Email me someone submits the form
The option is there but instead of providing a nice button with in the Form design interface the feature is accessible from the spreadsheet under the File > Set notification rules. Someone new to Google Docs will not find this feature so easily.

Still Google Docs forms are a very useful tool to collect data, create survey, run polls on your website or run live polls. Leisa Reichelt tried Google Docs Forms to collect survey and recruitment data with great success. I am sure Google Docs team will soon come up with new features to further improve forms and make them even more useful.

Another problem is that these templates are currently available in English only and other languages are coming soon. There is a chance that even then templates wont be available for all languages. There are people like me who work in a language that is not yet available for Google Docs. I work with Urdu, I need to set text direction to right-to-left (rtl), change fonts and align text properly. This is too much work thats why I needed templates.

The solution is that we create our own templates and use them. This feature is not officially available but creating a template is just like creating a new document. The only difference is that the template has style and design to meet your needs so that you don’t have to repeat it over and over again.

In your Google Docs dashboard create a new folder and Rename it to Templates. Now we can either use ready-made template provided by Google Docs or create our own. You can create your own templates by defining header, footer, fonts, font sizes, and other details and save them in your template folder. But if you don’t have much knowledge of CSS then your template might not look as good as those provided by Google Docs. So I would say that use one of ready-made templates. Click on New > From template… and choose a template from the gallery and press ‘Use this template’ button. The template will then open in your Google Docs. Now you can replace logo image, contact information, and other details to meet your needs and save it. Then come back to your dashboard you will see the template there as ‘Copy of (templatename)’. Right click on it and Select Move to, then select your Templates folder and press move to folder button.

Now when you want to use this template just open it like a regular document and ‘Save as new copy’. Now back to your Google Docs Dashboard you will see the Copy of you template there, rename it to meet your needs and start working on it.

You can also share your templates with other people. Have a look at the 7 Google Docs Templates which you will love by GoogleTutor and start playing with them.

Open your document with Google Docs and go to Edit > Edit CSS. This will open popup window with text editor. In this editor we will write the CSS style rules to set page margins.


body {
margin-right:10%;
margin-left:10%;
margin-top:20px;
}


Copy paste above given code in the Edit CSS window and press Ok. You will see the result in your document window. Now lets see what this tiny bit of css does. The body is called an attribute which tells your browser that the rules described below apply to entire document. } this curly bracket marks the beginning of rules. the next three lines describe rules to set margin properties. the last line tells that rules for body end here. Feel free to play with this bit of code go to Edit > Edit CSS again and set different margin size or add a rule to set bottom margin by adding margin-bottom:20px; just before the } line. Or you can also replace these three lines with just one line margin:10%; between the curly brackets.

Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) is an easy way to stylize your document. Using CSS is an effecient method to create style rules for your entire document, or your templates. We will talk more about CSS on this blog in our upcoming posts. However if you want to quickly learn CSS we highly recommend HTML Dog’s CSS for beginners guide, or W3Schools’ CSS tutorial.

How To Add A Header to a Document in Google Docs:

It is extremely simple, go to Insert > Header and you see header is inserted in your document. If you want to add a footer too then go to Insert > Footer and you have footer. Now when you print your document you see that the header and footer are repeated on each page.

How to add page number to Header or Footer in Google Docs:

Go to File > Print Settings. Under the Annotations heading check the box to Include page numbers and select the position where you want page number to appear. If you select Top right, center, or left then page numbers will appear in header. If you select Bottom right, left or center then page numbers will appear in footer.

Google Docs Print Settings

How To Format or change style of the Header and Footer in Google Docs:

There might be some other easier way to do this but the method I found is easier and flexible to my needs. My method is to edit the CSS. When you add Header or Footer in your Document Google Docs gives header the id and class of google_header. Same goes for footer with a class or id of google_footer. But to make sure that this is right you better check the HTML view of your document. Go to Edit > Edit HTML and you will see something like this in the begining of your document:


<div class="google_header" id="google_header">
<p id="d1pj"></p>
</div>
At the end of your document's HTML view you will see something like this:
<div class="google_footer" id="google_footer">


We will use the value in either class or id attributes to stylize our header and footer. Go to Edit > Edit CSS. A text box will appear where you can set style for your Header and footer. I used this style:


#google_header {
border: 3px solid #eee;
font-size: small;
color: #ccc;
}

#google_footer {
border: 3px solid #eee;
font-size: small;
color: #ccc;
}


Now when we click on the Print button we get a document with nice header and footer with page numbers on each page.

Google Chrome Browser Screenshot

I opened my browser and there was a link on the main Google page with an announcement about Google’s new browser Chrome. I was like wow, I was looking for a new browser for a long time. I was feeling kind of bored with Firefox. I tried Safari for Windows and Opera but didn’t like them much. So I reacted quickly to the invitation and installed Chrome on my Windows XP. Unfortunately Chrome is not yet available for Linux.