Printable Tools (The PDF Revolution Is Here)

In the previous post, I linked to Bolt Depot’s rather awesome collection of printable fastener related tools.

A friend mentioned that he ran across a site that has printable graph paper. I did a bit of google searching tonight and came up with some neat stuff.

It seems that PDF’s ability to describe the exact geometry of output has yielded wealth of such tools.

There are lots of examples of printable graph paper. Some sites let you create graph paper to your specifications.

Rulers are also available. This site includes Ruler PDFs along with lengths of common objects (like currency) so you can check the accuracy of your printed results.

There are also protractors.

And lots of math stuff. Including one with a smiley face and a couple of pac-men making out in the corner?

Battle maps.

Speaking of maps, there are incredible maps of various state parks in California.

Sheet music. And customizable sheet music.

Tons of education related content.

This site contains an incredible array of basic electronics information in a series of PDFs.

Both JameCo and Digi-Key offer full catalogs online. I’m certain many other companies do, as well.

There is also the Subversion Book, the Twisted Documentation in PDF form, the Python Documentation, and loads of PDFs in Apple’s support site.

Since Tiger so nicely indexes PDFs, I grab every PDF of interest I run across and toss ‘em into a directory in my Library. Same for every interesting web page that I may want to refer to later — it is converted to PDF and squirreled away.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, January 18th, 2006 at 1:11 am and is filed under Hacks, Technology, Tools. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.