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March 22, 2005 Ask Tourang a technical question Yahoo groups Let's say you have a bunch of friends from way back then and you want to communicate with all of them by email (kind of a group conversation email). But if you are like me, you are probably too lazy to type in everyone's email address all the time. I have tried this and it doesn't work too well mainly because even if you do your job right and don't miss the email addresses of any of your friends, once they receive the email, if they don't hit "Reply to all", the response will only come back to you, the sender, and other friends won't receive the response. Wouldn't it be great if you could just send your emails to let's say myfriends@xyz.com and all of your friends receive it? then your friends can send an email to the same email address (or reply to the one you sent) and yourself and others receive it? Well Yahoo Groups comes to the rescure. If you go to //groups.yahoo.com and create a yahoo groups account (name it whatever you want like myfriends@yahoogroups.com as long as it's not already taken), you will be able to do just that. You then become the owner (or administrator) of this account. You will be able to add/remove/modify email accounts (I think the limit is 50 emails right now). I have done this in the past and right now I have 4 or 5 yahoo group accounts: One for highschool friends, one for my old neighborhood friends in Iran (I call it mehrabad@yahoogroups.com), etc. etc. By the way, these email groups are private. That means if your email address is not part of this group, you won't be able to send email to the group. Tourang Latest Questions and Answers: PDF files Ali writes: I enjoyed your column in Iranian.com and that was the first of its kind there. I wish we had more access to people to technical people in computer like you. There are several things in computer field that I have not mastered and I like to start with PDF file. I just cannot seem to find a good source to utilize this. I understand that it is handy for publishing Farsi materials on the internet, but how can I go about this. I have searched the net and I have not found a way to do this. Perhaps if I spend more time I succeed. Tourang: Regarding PDF files, the best source to refer to is the manufacturer of PDF applications, namely Adobe (adobe.com). A little bit of background: With the advent of the internet, documents got to be viewed by a larger audience in HTML format. One problem that was detected early on was lack of good formatting in HTML. There are severe restrictions using HTML for production or viewing of documents i.e. problems with fomatting, borders, footnotes, headers, and most of all printing problems. If you go to a web page and go to File on your browser and hit the print button, the whole web page is printed in a stream of text output with no break in pages. Furthermore, pictures, menu options, ads, everything on the page is printed. This is less than ideal, especially for businesses who like to have applications running on the web but also want to have reports printed. These restrictions come about because your browser takes and html file from the server and converts it to a formatted text on your screen. The browser only understands HTML tags and nothing else including any of the formatting tags. A while back Adobe came out with it's Acrobat product to overcome these problems. The idea is that a plug-in (a piece of software that attaches to your browser) is installed and it's capable of reading PDF files. So when the web server sends a PDF file over to the browser, the browser uses the locally installed Acrobat Reader to display information. Especially made tags inside PDF files are then displayed properly and printing options are complete. In order for all of this to happen, the end user needs to install the Acrobat Reader and the web application server needs to provide a PDF files instead of plain HTML files. In addition to viewing PDF files, Adobe provides Adobe PDF package which enables you to create PDF files. In this case although Adobe Reader is downloaded for free, Adobe Package is not. I have not used this product personally to see how PDF files are created but I imagine there are multi-lingual options when producing PDF files for different locales. So to summarize, to view a PDF file you use the freely downloaded Acrobat Reader. To create PDF files, you need to purchase Adobe Package. Email your computer questions (all kinds of questions are welcome -- even personal ones, not!) About Tourang Birangi * *
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