Waffle Bytes

From the Michigan eLibrary: MeL’s EBSCO host e-books are downloadable in ePub or PDF format. The PDF version is a fixed layout of the print version of the book, and ePub allows the text to be adjusted easily for any device or screen size. With Adobe Digital Editions (freely downloadable from Adobe.com), e-books are mobile friendly. The ePub format also makes e-books compatible with adaptive technologies, including screen reading software. The table of contents in the e-books links directly to a specific chapter.  You can also read the e-book right in your web browser. The e-books can be organized and downloaded to Google Drive – or any other file storage. Passages can be highlighted, shared, notes added, emailed, and printed. For researchers and students, there is an automatic citation generator that can be used in conjunction with popular products like RefWorks, EndNote, or Zotero. For librarians and teachers, integrating these e-book features should be an essentia...

A new feature showed up in my Drive this week - the ability to comment on non-GDrive files!  This is a great new feature in making additional files collaborative in nature.  It will work with MS Office files, PDFs and images.  The document must be in preview mode for the feature to be available.  This is the previous view of options when in preview mode -  This is the new view for a files that has NOT been added to your Drive yet - And here is the new view for the files that HAVE been added to your Drive - When viewing the document, clicking on the comment icon, highlight the part or sentence you wish to comment on, then add your comment - Additionally there is a new setting option of Manage comment notifications - You can choose the conditions for which you would like to be notified of comments on this particular file -

Yesterday morning I had to take an approximately 100 page PDF document and divide it into 56 individual documents.  I had a way to do this previously, but it involved selecting the to print and saving as PDF - more steps than I wanted to do for as many as I was dividing into this morning.  So, in the search and trial to changing my process to being more efficient, I discovered a neat trick with Apple's Preview. Make sure your Sidebar tray is showing thumbnails (here's the icon to turn it on if it is not): Select (highlight) your selection in the Sidebar tray (tricks for multiple pages - 1. if they are consecutive you can click the first, hold down shift & click the last to select the range; 2. if they are NOT consecutive you can hold the command key while selecting the pages you want) Copy (here's the menu selection, you can also command+C) You will note in the File Menu that the choice for New has changed to New From Clipboard - select that to create ...