Despite the theme of both major American political parties in last year's presidential campaign, so far the winds of change in Washington, D.C. seem to be at best a gentle breeze. The Democrats and Republicans are, as usual, both villianizing each other as the primary source of the country's problems -- although they've reversed roles, with Pres. Barrack Obama and his fellow Democrats now having the edge in numbers and control of power, and thus inheriting a greater share of the blame.
Fingerpointing still prevails as a favorite political sport in the nation's capital -- and in at least one instance, the Portable Document Format has been cited as a key factor in one particular conspiracy allegation.
Right-wing radio host Rush Limbaugh exclaimed on the air last Friday that the Democrats have turned to using PDF as a way to conceal the details in the "American Recovery and Reinvestment Tax Act of 2009," a 575-page document that is a major component of the nearly $800-billion-plus stimulus package passed by the U. S. House of Representatives -- with no Republican support.
Limbaugh said the wily Democrats "have reformatted the bill -- they've made it a PDF file when they posted it. Now, for those of you that don't use computers, basically what that means is that it cannot be keyword searched. A PDF file is essentially a picture of a page. And, so, you can read every page, but you cannot keyword search it. It's not a text file as legislation normally is as posted on these public websites. They don't want anybody knowing what's in this; they want it happening as fast as possible so nobody can know what's in it."
Had he launched his free Adobe Reader prior to making that allegation, Limbaugh might have noticed the built-in tools to either "Find" or "Search" within the lengthy congressional document -- visible in the main toolbar, accessible through the menus, or activated with keyboard shortcuts.
Or he could have browsed the built-in Help in Reader 9 -- "Adobe Reader Help: What can you do with Adobe Reader?"
It provides a concise description of the program's many capabilities:
Find information in a PDF
Use either the Search window (Edit > Search) or the Find toolbar to
search page content, including layers, form fields, annotations,
bookmarks and digital signatures.
Had Limbaugh really wanted a plain-text version, Reader provides an option to save the document as accessible text; it took less than a minute when I saved the entire contents to a text file.
It's probably fair to note that Limbaugh had at least some awareness of what a PDF file is. The same is apparently not true of Sen. Joe Lieberman of Connecticut, who was technology-savvy Al Gore's pick for Vice President in 2000. (Gore and Lieberman were edged out by Republicans Bush and Cheney.)
According to several posted accounts, Lieberman -- now an Independent -- recently blanked on the term 'PDF' during a confirmation hearing. Peter Orszag, the new Office of Management and Budget chief, had told the Senate government affairs committee that the Obama administration planned "to create a website that will contain information about the contracts and include PDFs or contracts themselves, and also financial information about the contracts."
Lieberman's puzzled reply: "Define PDFs."
It might be time to invite Lieberman to a meeting of the Washington, D.C. Acrobat User Group.
And save a seat for Limbaugh, too.