Although this post isn’t an inspirational post, it is in line with other software reviews I’ve done in the past. Since many of us who have blogs need various software, I like to pass along the news when I discover a good product.

I often want to edit pdf files that my home-based business company provides, so I’ve been looking around for a more economical editor than the very expensive Adobe Acrobat, which started the pdf (portable document format) phenomenon. I may want to add my personal contact information to a file or split out a page or two from the monthly health magazine that’s available in the pdf format. I may even want to redo the look a bit but keep the content. I did that this weekend when I took out a large graphic at the top of the original article so I’d have room to add the overflow text from a second page all onto the one new page I was creating.

To do some of these kinds of things, I needed to have a pdf editor that allowed me to do more than just add new text and graphics. There are free or inexpensive pdf editors that can add new material but not edit existing material. There are also several fairly inexpensive editors (in the $50–$100 range) that enable editing, but the ease with which they do it varies.

After trying three different editors this weekend, I found one I really like—Iceni Technology’s INfix PDF Editor, Version 4. Somehow I’d never come across it before, in my continuing search for pdf editors. (The other two were Foxit PDF Editor and Nitro PDF Professional.) I was delighted at how easy and natural it is to edit a file with INfix. To get more familiar with the product, I looked at many of the excellent tutorial videos Infix provides on their site.

Unlike the other editors, INfix edits text like a word processor. Other editors often work only on lines of text instead of blocks of text. INfix even lets you create and edit blocks of text, columns, and text linked between columns or pages. This editor makes it a breeze to edit text. Like a word processor, it lets you easily apply font style and size, bold, italic, and underline, and subscript or superscript to selected text. It even has buttons for applying single, line-and-a-half, and double line spacing to a selected block of text. For justification, you can select from left, centered, right, and full justification.

The Rotate tool lets you easily rotate selected objects. You can also align selected objects with its various Alignment buttons. The Link tool makes it easy to add links to existing text, to make them clickable for your readers, or to edit existing links. The Fill Colour and Line Colour tools make it easy to select from a variety of colors or roll your own, via the color tool dialog box. You can even use the eye-dropper within the dialog box to select the color from an existing color elsewhere on your page.

For drawing, there are five tools: Pencil, Rectangle, Line, Ellipse, and Pen. You can use the Shift key to constrain these tools to drawing square, round, diagonal, and straight.

Document management is also easy. You can also insert, delete, extract, rotate, resize, and reorder pages within the document. And you can crop a page to include only part of its content. You can also insert another document into your current document, either before or after the current page.

Changing the view can be done by buttons (Actual size, Entire page, or Fit document to window), by keyboard shortcuts, by the Zoom tool, by clicking + or – on the Navigation bar, or by selecting from a list of pre-defined zoom values.

The Infix PDF Editor comes in three flavors—INfix (standard, $99), INfix Pro ($159 and volume licensing), and INfix Server (flexible pricing). I took advantage of the 14–day trial to test Infix before deciding on it. All features were available and usable with no trial-copy watermarking of my saved documents.

If you need an excellent pdf editor and don’t want to pay Adobe’s price, I heartily recommend you give one of the Infix editors a try. I believe you’ll be glad you did. You can view a chart comparing INfix with Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, Foxit, and Nitro PDF Pro here.

Charles David Heineke

Here’s another offering from Abraham, the loving, non-physical group channeled by Esther Hicks. Abraham addresses why we get sick and how we can move away from dis-ease by focusing on the wellness we seek, instead of focusing on the sickness we seem to have in this moment.

In the video below, Esther Hicks, speaking the wisdom of Abraham, a loving group of non-physical entities, explains how Source sees what we humans call disasters and calamities. Source sees that many are having a similar, unwanted situation, and offering their vibration in response to that, rather than in response to what they want. So they, as a group, create a solution to their wanting, even though it may not seem to be the solution they would have consciously chosen, if they were consciously choosing, which they aren’t. They’re just reacting, not choosing. The bottom line is that they’re expressing their wanting for a better life and they’re getting it, despite how it looks to us.

In 1994, among some other life-changing decisions, I made a conscious, deliberate decision to become “a lover”–one who loves, no matter what. That decision has guided my life ever since. I choose to be one who loves, regardless of what another does or doesn’t do. That decision gives me permission to life my life based on my choosing to love, not in response to what another does or doesn’t do relative to me.

By consciously making this decision, I became a source of love, not one looking for love. All of my life, up to that point, had been focused on trying to win the love and approval of others. I didn’t know who I was, because who I was depended on what I thought I needed to be to win someone else’s approval. Not any more.

Choosing to be “a lover”, whether or not I “have a lover”, frees me up and blesses me, for I’ve learned that I only need to give love in order to have love flowing through me. It means that I can let everybody else “off the hook”. I don’t have to try to manipulate anyone into loving me. They don’t have to “love me” in order for me to feel loved. If I want to feel more love, all I need do is feel more love flowing through me.

I know that I can bless the world simply by focusing love to flow through me. I feel it coursing through me, blessing and uplifting me, on its way wherever, to whomever. I learned long ago that when water flows through a pipe, the pipe gets wet, too! And so it is with love flowing through us.

The inspirational movie below summarizes some of what I feel. Enjoy.

Charles David Heineke