Acro bytes by Kurt Foss

A day after a big news day seems a good time to mention a PDF-rich website that showcases more than 500 front pages from 53 countries–minus the ink stains. Each day the Newseum posts Page One from a diverse collection of participating newspapers around the country and world, offering at a glance a chance to compare and contrast how the day’s top stories were reported. You can read the articles (if fully contained on the front page) if you download a PDF version — first click on a small thumbnail image to launch a larger view of a particular newspaper, and from that page you have the option of downloading a PDF. (In Acrobat or Reader, use the Zoom tool to make the text more readable.)

On a day like today–Nov. 8–yesterday’s mid-term elections dominate most of the headlines, with state and area results serving to tailor the coverage for specific regions and communities. It’s a quick way to get a variety of perspectives on current news events from one online portal. The Newseum also maintains an archive of front pages from select news events of “historical significance,” beginning with the 9/11 terrorist attacks up to the current war in Iraq.

Regarding the upcoming U. S. elections, the good news for most Americans is that in just over a week, the season of often-nasty and increasingly personal political campaign advertising will finally end. All that will be left when polls close on the evening of November 7 is counting the votes.

However, that may itself be a source of further divisiveness and potential scandal, according to a 27-page report titled “How to steal an election by hacking the vote” [PDF: 3MB] published and being freely distributed by Ars Technica, a technology trends website. It warns that security flaws in a number of electronic voting solutions now make it increasingly possible to hijack an election. Author Ken Fisher explains that “I’m not in any way encouraging anyone to actually go out and steal an election. This article is intended solely as a guide to the kinds of information and techniques that election thieves already have available, and not as an incitement to or an aid for committing crimes.”

According to the website, after it initially offered the report only to subscribers to its premium service, “we received a flood of requests that we release a free copy of the article’s PDF … [and] suggested that the PDF should be emailed to elected officials, especially congresspersons and Secretaries of State, as a kind of wake-up call for how insecure our elections are.”

The site notes that its intentions are non-political:

“Please remember, election fraud is a bipartisan issue. Both parties have stolen elections in the past, and regardless of what you may think of one party or the other as we head into the hotly contested November mid-terms, the fate of our American tradition of self-rule is at stake.”

Design Tools Monthly, a commercial newsletter aimed at graphics design professionals, summarizes timely articles, tips and other useful information from a broad range of design industry magazines and websites.

Coverage includes both Acrobat and Reader, which in a sense is also a tad self-serving, since the monthly newsletter is made available to paid subscribers in PDF. It behooves publisher and editor Jay Nelson to have newsletter readers who are savvy with PDF files, in part so they appreciate the various user-enabling features he and the staff build into each issue–including bookmarks, active weblinks and article threads.

TThe DTM website currently features a free-to-view Quicktime video clip that highlights the publication’s helpful navigational elements and provides a demonstration of how to take full advantage of the search functionality built into Acrobat and Reader. The “PDF Power Search” [QT: 17.3 MB] tutorial reviews both basic and advanced search capabilities, showing how a newsletter subscriber can maintain a folder of of archived issues and then easily search them using various criteria–search terms are highlighted in the results.

The site offers a free sample issue for download.