I recently mentioned that a manuscript written with MSWord will often have to be converted to PDF before a book-printing company will accept it. Although MSWord is the world's most-used word processor, it is not the most stable. WordPerfect is said by many experts to be a better program in several ways, and recent versions even have a built-in PDF conversion feature. My reason for writing more frequently about Word is the volume of questions I get regarding the program. I seldom hear a WP question.

A PDF (portable document file) has the advantage of being equally well suited for being displayed legibly on a computer screen or for creating properly-formatted pages for inkjet printing or for a commercially printed book. Companies who can afford Adobe Acrobat have traditionally used this program to do Word-to-PDF conversions, while many of my readers tell of successful results with PDF995, NitroPDF, and Primo PDF. The free OpenOffice Suite also does PDF. The URLs to these programs can be found on my site at www.pcdon.com.

PDF has also become the de facto standard for legal and government forms that can be downloaded, printed, and filled in manually. However, I get frequent calls from folks who see such a form on their monitor and wonder why they can't type directly into its blank spaces. Well, documents that can be typed into, such as a 1040 from TurboTax, are not PDFs — they are created with an entirely different type of programming.

Back to PDF — they can be opened by anyone, since Adobe makes Acrobat Reader free and available at www.adobe.com or www.download.com

A number of readers have asked if a PDF can be converted to a Word file. Well, I see PDF-to-Word programs advertised online, but have never tried one. Nonetheless, individual sections of a PDF can be copied and pasted into any word processor.

To copy some text, click on the "I-beam" Select tool, and then mouse-select a block of text. A message will appear that your selection has been "Copied to the Clipboard." Now you can paste it into your word processing page (or into an e-mail) and reformat it if desired.

To copy an image, click on the "Camera Snapshot Tool" and draw a box around whatever you want to copy. Again, a "Copied to the Clipboard" message will tell you the selection can then be pasted to a location of your choice.

A unique feature of the Snapshot tool is that you are not restricted to copying an image. You can also copy a block of text. However, such a text block would be treated as an image when pasted somewhere, meaning you could NOT edit the text. Any text pasted after being selected with the I-beam tool, however, is fully editable.