He was right (again)

Once upon a time, I complained about Scott Hanselman pimping a piece of commercial software when there was a perfectly good open-source alternative available.

Except there wasn’t, and I was wrong. Mea culpa.

Since then it will be obvious to regular readers that I am no longer so adverse to commercial software, especially when there is no clear free/open-source alternative.

FinePrint

The other day, Scott once again waxed lyrical about some life (or rather paper in this case) saving software called FinePrint. I read it, it vaguely piqued my curiosity, and then I promptly forgot about it.

Until today.

Now, normally I try to be as paperless as possible, but sometimes you can’t beat holding a lump of dead tree in your hand. I find this especially to be the case when dealing with books (although I’m also a big fan of eBooks) and long technical papers. When I read stuff on the screen, I always find I skip stuff.

Today I needed to review a document written by a colleague. I needed to make notes on it, and also create a new document from it. Unfortunately I don’t have a multi-monitor set-up at the moment, so I decided to print it out. Then I realised it was 30 pages long, and my aging EPSON Stylus Photo 890 doesn’t do duplex. It does do multi-page though, but I wanted to use as little paper as possible. I was just figuring out how to both multi-page and manual duplex when FinePrint came to mind. A few minutes later and the problem was solved and I could move on.

Fantastic piece of software, and highly recommended.

Of course if anyone knows of an F/OSS alternative, let me know.