I’ve recently discovered two great tools for creating and sharing beautiful documents. Firstly, there’s LaTex, which is widely used within the scientific and engineering communities to create documents which are clearly and logically set out. It’s a way to avoid all of those irksome errors which can occur when using a word processor, such as different fonts and font sizes being used where they shouldn’t. LaTex takes complete control over the entire type setting process, and in this case I decided to create my previous blog post as a pdf in order to illustrate its use. As you can see, the results are far superior to what can usually be achieved with a word processor. It’s particularly useful for authors of ebooks who can use LaTex to create professional looking documents.

The second tool is Scribd. The easiest way to think of it is as YouTube for documents. It allows you to upload image and document files, and then subsequently share them, either through the thriving community on their website, or by embedding them in your own blog. I can personally vouch for how useful this is – Blogger has no such facility for displaying pdfs, and I’ve previously had to resort to hosting services such as Rapidshare, but I’ve found that people are put off when they click on a link and are sent to an entirely different website. The beauty of Scribd is that along with the embedded document are some fairly sophisticated tools, the like of which you’d expect from a stand alone pdf viewer.

So while LaTex is pretty niche, I expect Scribd to rapidly increase in popularity, especially given the ease of sharing documents – uploading and embedding the files takes two minutes maximum. So get out there and start creating some documents!