BY CATHAL McQUAID

THE UH's online service is undergoing a major upgrade with state-of-the-art technology providing even easier access to the paper's web edition. The paper will now be available in Portable Document Format (PDF) which can be read online or downloaded to the reader's home computer.

The new PDF format will be available free of charge for a trial period on the website www.ulsterherald.com

The UH website will also be updated twice each sweek with the PDF edition to include both the Thursday edition and the Tyrone Herald on Mondays. In addition, the Herald's sister papers, including the Stabane Chronicle, will have a PDF edition on their own dedicated websites.

Editor Darach MacDonald said, "We are committed to providing our readers with the most immediate access to our editions and that includes our PDF format. This should be a huge attaction for our overseas readers because this technology will allow Tyrone people all over the world to keep fully up-to-date with what is happening at home simply with the touch of a button and then the flick of each PDF page."

Lindsay Kyle-Ewing, head of IT at the UH's publishing company in Omagh says the new technology "is a much easier way to view the stories online. The PDF means it can just be read like a normal paper".

PDFs have an advantage over standard Internet pages because documents, such as an entire paper, can be kept together and searched much more easily. Instead of having to use one whole page for even the smallest story, a number of stories appear on a single page, just like in a regular newspaper.

The PDF editions will be available for all Northwest of Ireland Printing and Publishing titles: The UH/TyroneHerald, Gaelic Life, Donegal News, Strabane Chronicle and Fermanagh Herald.