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PDF Writer, Free?

J

Jim Thompson

Jan 1, 1970
0
Awhile back someone mentioned that they had a program that was *free*
that could create PDFs.

A friend has a need for such a program, but my surfing/googling hasn't
yielded an answer.

Can someone refresh my memory?

Thanks!

...Jim Thompson
 
M

Mario Trams

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim said:
Awhile back someone mentioned that they had a program that was *free*
that could create PDFs.

A friend has a need for such a program, but my surfing/googling hasn't
yielded an answer.

Can someone refresh my memory?

Yes, with pdflatex you can create PDFs (the text has to be written
in LaTeX, of course).
There are also free tools available for PostScript-to-PDF conversion;
ps2pdf for instance.

All this is more or less standard stuff in UNIX/Linux systems.
But I guess that these things are available for native Windows as well.

Regards,
Mario


--
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Digital Force / Mario Trams [email protected]-chemnitz.de
[email protected]
Chemnitz University of Technology http://www.tu-chemnitz.de/~mtr
Dept. of Computer Science Tel.: (+49) 371 531 1660
Chair of Computer Architecture Fax.: (+49) 371 531 1818
----------------------------------------------------------------------
 
O

Oppie

Jan 1, 1970
0
_________________
| Awhile back someone mentioned that they had a program that was *free*
| that could create PDFs.
|
| A friend has a need for such a program, but my surfing/googling hasn't
| yielded an answer.
|
| Can someone refresh my memory?
|
| Thanks!
|
| ...Jim Thompson


I got my copy as part of Adobe PhotoDeluxe that came with the HP
Scanjet3300C. If you go to HP's website you can download the files that were
on the original distribution CD. (kids, don't try this at home without
broadband)

Oppie

sig line moved to bottom specially for JT :)
thanks for the heads up.
 
J

Jim Thompson

Jan 1, 1970
0
Take a look at:
http://www.webxd.com/zipguy/freepdf.htm

They claim free with no Spyware/Adware but I haven't used it myself.

Robert Hickey
Thanks, Robert. Downloaded it and passed it on. Friend is computer
illiterate *and* cheap... we'll see how it works out ;-)

(I have Adobe Acrobat myself.)

...Jim Thompson
 
M

Michael A. Terrell

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim said:
Thanks, Robert. Downloaded it and passed it on. Friend is computer
illiterate *and* cheap... we'll see how it works out ;-)

(I have Adobe Acrobat myself.)

...Jim Thompson

http://www.pdf995.com/ works well for me.
 
S

Spehro Pefhany

Jan 1, 1970
0
Thanks, Robert. Downloaded it and passed it on. Friend is computer
illiterate *and* cheap... we'll see how it works out ;-)

If he/she just wants to create "MS office" type documents, they can
pop over to openoffice.org, download the suite (only 63M, so just a
few minutes). You can export as PDF directly from the program. It
opens Word, Excel, etc. documents. The price is right, too. (free).

Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
 
F

Frank Bemelman

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim Thompson said:
On Sun, 07 Sep 2003 20:05:52 GMT, "Michael A. Terrell"

[snip]

That page implies that you first print a PS file then convert. Is
that a correct interpretation?

Possibly, but you won't notice. You simply select pdf995 as your printer,
and print from your application. A dialog pops up to type in the *.pdf
filename, and that's it. I paid $10 for it, to get rid of the ads, and
it is certainly value for money.
 
G

Garrett Mace

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim Thompson said:
Awhile back someone mentioned that they had a program that was *free*
that could create PDFs.

A friend has a need for such a program, but my surfing/googling hasn't
yielded an answer.

Can someone refresh my memory?

Thanks!


I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Ghostscript, which at least in my
experience is the de facto standard for non-Adobe PDF creation. There even
exist plugins to create a "PDF Printer" much like Adobe's own. I've used
Ghostscript many times to create a PDF from a CAD drawing.

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
 
M

Mike

Jan 1, 1970
0
Awhile back someone mentioned that they had a program that was *free*
that could create PDFs.

A friend has a need for such a program, but my surfing/googling hasn't
yielded an answer.

Can someone refresh my memory?

Thanks!

...Jim Thompson

Sounds like you've already found a solution. If that doesn't work, there's
always ghostscript. There is a Windows version, which you can download free
from somewhere. One of the batch utilities that comes with it is a PS to
PDF converter. In previous versions, it took quite a bit of flogging to
make the converter work, but my recollection is that the most recent
release works with no modification.

-- Mike --
 
A

Active8

Jan 1, 1970
0
If he/she just wants to create "MS office" type documents, they can
pop over to openoffice.org, download the suite (only 63M, so just a
few minutes). You can export as PDF directly from the program. It
opens Word, Excel, etc. documents. The price is right, too. (free).

Best regards,
Spehro Pefhany
yeah. and it opened my xls, doc, etc. files. so it looks like it does
everything the microshaft product does, but the UI might be
better/easier to learn.

mike
 
M

Michael A. Terrell

Jan 1, 1970
0
Garrett said:
I'm surprised that no one has mentioned Ghostscript, which at least in my
experience is the de facto standard for non-Adobe PDF creation. There even
exist plugins to create a "PDF Printer" much like Adobe's own. I've used
Ghostscript many times to create a PDF from a CAD drawing.

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

http://www.pdf995.com/ is a shell program that uses Ghostscript and
Ghostwriter to do the grunt work.
 
M

Michael A. Terrell

Jan 1, 1970
0
Jim said:
On Sun, 07 Sep 2003 20:05:52 GMT, "Michael A. Terrell"

[snip]

That page implies that you first print a PS file then convert. Is
that a correct interpretation?

...Jim Thompson

No, its like Frank said, you select PDF995 as your printer, then a
window pops up for you to enter a filename. You can select a directory
if you want a different one, then you click save. That's all there is
to it.
 
G

Gregg

Jan 1, 1970
0
Scribus will convert .txt to .pdf and write them from scratch too.
 
Another one that no one has mentioned, which may be best of all is a
program called fineprint (www.fineprint.com) which will work like a
printer. Create your document with whatever program you want and then
print with the fineprint "pdf printer" .. I think it is limited to 5
pages per document, but most of the ones I use are 1 page anyway. Of
course if you wanna buy it it is not limited. (50$) .. It will even
combine output pages, up to 8 on one 8x10 page.. acts like a versatle
virtual printer. Then of course just use acrobat reader to read/print
the pages.
 
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