1. Home
  2. Electronics Design
  3. Qualcomm in talks to acquire NXP
  4. Page 3

Qualcomm in talks to acquire NXP

Yawn, grumble, and thanks. With inspiration provided by Jim Thomson, I contrived a much easier way. The problem is that it's not quite what I expected and may not be suitable for everyone's needs.

Download and install Iranview and Irfanview plugins. Irfanview is a good free photo editor that can also handle PDFs via plugins. Here's how:

- Open the PDF file with Irfanview.

- "Save As" with a "Save as type" PDF.

- Check the "Show Options Dialog" at the bottom of page.

- Hit "Save" button.

- A "Save PDF" dialog box will appear.

- Under the "Security" tab, uncheck the "Activate Security" check box.

- Hit "Save" button and the view the PDF in Adobe Acrobat or whatever.

The owner password should be cleared in the resultant PDF. You should now be able to add annotations, sticky notes, and scribbles to the data sheets with Irfanview (hit F12) or any PDF editor.

Some limitations, details, notes, ideas, and problems:

The process changes the text fonts to a bit mapped graphic, which cannot be text edited. The original NXP data sheet shows 8 fonts, mostly Helvetica and Symbol. The converted PDF show no fonts and is a graphic. The results are readable and printable, but of lower quality than the original. If this is a problem, you may do better with a password cracker/remover program.

Since the converted page is a graphic, it is possible to use PDF-Xchange Editor (free): Document -> OCR Pages feature to recover making the document searchable. The NXP data sheet took about 6 minutes to OCR 11 pages.

Under the "Save PDF" dialog, under the "Layout" tab, you can change the page size from A4 to letter. This is handy because I haven't found a good way to change the document size for printing in Acrobat or PDF-XChange viewers.

Under the "Save PDF" dialog, under the "Compression" tab, you may want to adjust the image qualities. I tried turning off compression, but that expanded the original 78KByte file to about 28MBytes (with an OCR text layer).

Irfanview can do batch processing. File -> Batch Conversion/Rename I haven't tried this yet, but it might be possible to use this to clear passwords from a directory full of PDF files.

Irfanview can be run from the command line: which can probably be used for batch processing.

--
Jeff Liebermann     jeffl@cruzio.com 
150 Felker St #D    http://www.LearnByDestroying.com 
Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com 
Skype: JeffLiebermann     AE6KS    831-336-2558
Reply to
Jeff Liebermann
Loading thread data ...
[snip]

It's now free for "personal use"...

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson | mens | | Analog Innovations | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | | | Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat | | E-mail Icon at

formatting link
| 1962 |

Reply to
Jim Thompson

As pointed out above, they are a bunch of asshats. Same with all the semiconductor companies giving out pointless SPICE models that are pretty much an ideal component, although they have accurate in-house models because they need them in order to design the chip in the first place, and all of their competitors have already reverse engineered a complete netlist of the part, if it was any good.

Perhaps they know that they almost certainly are infringing somebody's patent (of course they are - virtually every textbook circuit has been patented in the last 20 years, at least once and usually several times). Maybe they think that keeping everything confidential will reduce the likelihood of patent trolls latching onto that part as a potential thing to sue about. Also, they probably don't want hobbyists asking questions about how to use their parts, pointing out the embarrasing mistakes in the datasheet, and generally doing things that were not written in their business plan.

Hmm they still haven't integrated the loop filter. See US6891412 for one way to do that, but I guess that doesn't expire until 2025. There are some other ways to do it also.

Reply to
Chris Jones

There's neither a file name nor a copy and paste lock on unix. OTOH Foxit on Windows tells me "Sorry, copying text from this document is not allowed." Now that's just the sort of provocation that can turn nearly everyone into an angry cuss.

Thank you,

--
Don Kuenz KB7RPU 

    He who would not be frustrate of his hope to write well hereafter in 
laudable things ought himself to be a true poem. - Milton
Reply to
Don Kuenz

ElectronDepot website is not affiliated with any of the manufacturers or service providers discussed here. All logos and trade names are the property of their respective owners.