Another guest post from my dad - he actually wrote this one for us ages ago, but with all the fuss over us moving to Devon, PigPog has been a bit neglected just recently. Most people are probably reasonably familliar with PDF files - they're quite often used for all sorts of things - manuals, brochures, and such like. Anything where the layout is important, or people may want to download the document to keep around for reference. It's a good format, with software available to read PDF files on most platforms, but relatively few people actually know how to create the files in the first place. OpenOffice can generate them directly, but if you work in any other application, you can use a converter, which usually acts as if it's another printer installed on your machine. When you 'print' to this imaginary printer, the result is a PDF file on your disk, rather than a bit of paper on your desk.

Anyway, whist trying out some of these, he found some huge differences in the sizes of files they create - useful to know if you want people to download the results - not everyone has broadband. Over to Tim...

A great article from O'Reilly on Managing Digital Images. It's a bit heavily based around Adobe Bridge, and that comes with Photoshop, which is a bit expensive, but it does give you some good ideas for how to better manage your pics with any management software. I don't really do anything like this myself now, but I don’t take that many photos either, so sifting through them by keyword isn't too bad.

• Lifehacker: Adobe Lightroom Beta.

Looks quite decent, actually. Sounds like it’s going to be pay-for-ware when it’s finished, so it’ll have to be a good step up from the free Picasa to be worth it, but it does look good.

I probably won’t be trying it out myself - I’m still tempted with trying to make the jump to Linux soon, so I don’t want to set up a workflow for myself that involves any apps only available for Windows and Mac.

Thanks to Lifehacker for pointing to the Tutorials on Adobe’s site - includes lots of tutorials for many different products - Photoshop, Flash, InDesign, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Premier, etc.

There’s ten tutorials listed per page, and Photoshop’s listing runs to ten pages, so there should be plenty to keep anyone busy there.

Lifehacker have linked to a story on O’Reilly on automating Photoshop with Actions. As usual, a couple of useful tips in the comments at Lifehacker too.

I’ve not actually read the O’Reilly story yet, but I’ll stick it her