Activism 102

I observed that a few bloggers have not found a better way to capture and distribute scanned  articles. Take, for instance, the two-page article by Malu Fernandez that drew outrage from the blogosphere for its derogatory remarks about the overseas Filipino workers.

A couple of bloggers that scanned the two pages into two separate .jpg files and uploaded the two files for everyone’s access must have been unaware that there is a way for the two .jpg to be unified into a single file under the PDF format. Here’s how:

1. Open a new OpenOffice Text document.
2. Insert each image (.jpg file) into a page, depending on how you’d like them to be placed. If they are pages of an article, place each image in a page. (Tip: Insert a manual page break for every image.) The command for inserting an image is: Insert->Picture->From File.
3. Review the layout of the pages.
4. Save the document. Or, you may not have to do so if you’re just concerned about the PDF output.
5. Export the document (or the buffer if you’ve not saved the document) to PDF format: File->Export as PDF.

This howto is most applicable in a situation where a voluminous document cannot, for various reasons, be re-encoded, so the better way to get an electronic version out of it is by scanning each page.

And I’m sorry that this howto applies to OpenOffice only. As far as I know, Microsoft Office does not have the built export-to-PDF feature. Although, there’s a licensed plugin from Adobe Acrobat Writer.