Tools of the Trade

In Tips for Preparing Sales Documents, No. 2, I mentioned the electronic dictionary, Babylon. Several people sent me questions about Babylon and, since this is an Israeli development and a very effective tool as well, I am going to expand on Babylon and discuss a few other tools that are very handy.

Babylon (www.babylon.com) – and this is definitely not a plug for this product or any other application mentioned here – in its basic version, is a fairly effective on-line thesaurus and dictionary providing explanations and/or synonyms of selected terms. What is really great about Babylon is that, with the basic license (US$34 a year) you get up to seven additional language glossaries (including Hebrew and Arabic, of course). In a single click, Babylon gives full text translation and explanation of a word in any type of document or any Web site. You can select the seven glossaries from a list of dozens of languages.

For more money, they are happy to sell a wide range of additional and more sophisticated dictionaries (e.g. Oxford) and encyclopedias (e.g. Britannica).

Another on-line dictionary is WordWeb (http://wordweb.info) which is basically free. WordWeb is also an English thesaurus and dictionary for Windows that can look up words in almost any type of document or any Web site. I find that the explanations and synonyms provided are better than those in the basic Babylon dictionary.

What does “basically free” mean? Antony Lewis, the developer of this very nice tool requests that the WordWeb free version be used only by people who take, at most, two commercial flights (not more than one return flight) in any 12-month period. People who fly more than that are supposed to purchase the Pro version of WordWeb. This is some kind of punishment for polluting our environment and payment is, of course, a question of conscience. My guess is that the fee is applicable to about 98% of the readers of this newsletter. A single user license – for those with scruples – isUS$29. You can also purchase about a dozen European language glossaries for US$14. I don’t know how good these are.

I have both tools on my notebook and they cohabit very nicely.

Retrieve PDF (http://www.software.ebandwagon.co.uk) is an extremely useful tool that allows you to unprotect a locked PDF file so that you can copy, edit, and print the text. In addition to stripping off the file protection, it is supposed to be able to recover PDF passwords. I have never tried this facet of the program. It costs US$10.

I use two graphic conversion tools to get huge Word files down to workable volume. In about 90% of the cases, files that are greater than 2 MB in size are inflated due to the graphics. In most cases, photographers have supplied printshop quality images which are highly unnecessary and totally unpractical, or you have converted PowerPoint drawings to a standard graphic format.

Easy Graphic Converter (http://www.etrusoft.com/graphic-converter) is a free utility that converts graphic files to various formats and also enhances the image quality. This is particularly important when you have huge bitmap files (*.bmp, *.dib). You can convert them to JPEG format (*.jpg, *.jpeg) and knock them down to 10% of the original size. It works in batch mode and you can select a whole folder for conversion.

JPEG ReSizer (downloadable from www. cnet.com or any of the other Web download sites) is a very simple, free-of-charge utility that resizes JPEG files. This tool is also very handy when you are plagued with huge files. I reduced photographs, where each JPEG file was about 8 MB, to less than 500 KB each – without loss in quality. The program also runs in batch mode.

By the way, Babylon has a very nice add-on called the Babylon Builder, an absolutely free tool that lets you build your own dictionaries. Over the past few years I have assembled a Babylon telecom glossary which now contains almost 2000 terms. If you are interested in having a copy to use with Babylon, it is available for the asking – just send me your request.