free/cheap PDF (Pretender PDF as example)

[Kester Pelagius]

Greetings,

Hooked PDF995 up to Word 2002 and having no problem with it.  It churns out some very nice looking PDFs.  Perhaps I grabbed the newest and spiffiest version of it, or maybe it has to do with Word 2002's handling of fonts.  It seems to be highly useful for proofing a document, although Word itself is giving me the fits to die for.  It has issues with trying to do spacing beneath fonts and rules, and is telling me that eventually I'll need to either learn Ghostscript or LaTeX or shell out cash for some real layout tools.

PDF995 is not bad.  In fact it, IMHO, is quite decent. Since you can also download PDFedit, which allows you to add in links and all, that's a major plus.  However another good "free" alternative option you may want to look at is PDFCreator.  It takes slightly longer to compile the PDF but the resulting document seems to be a bit clearer and requires less troubleshooting than might a document using a lot of fancy fonts with PDF995.

My comments: I've used PDFCreator three or four times and found the test documents to be, on the whole, neat and well done.

Also don't forget that the OpenOffice.Org suite has a Export to PDF feature as well.  (But will require quite a few hours to download on a dialup.)  The plus being that OpenOffice.Org seems to have some support sites out there.  Perhaps not as many as GIMP, but if you look around you'll probably find a few plug-ins for it.  ?


Kind Regards,

Kester Pelagius

[Clay]

Emily,

Your experiences with Scribus match my own. It works, but it's a fight every step of the way. Since LaTeX works well for me, and requires nothing more complicated than a text editor to use, I finally relegated scribus to the fun toy category and wound up doing my project in LaTeX.

[Emily_Dresner]

(Reposted in the CORRECT place)

Two little blips:

- I downloaded and installed PDFCreator. Although it's only a 0.7Beta, it's much better than PDF995. It also costs nothing, and has no annoying ads. The PDF it generated is pretty nice and smooth, and has tons of tweaking options. I did notice that it installed ghostscript 8.0 when it performed its install.

- LaTeX scares me. The tutorial is 143 pages long. It is, however, obscenely powerful and it does everything including feeding the cat. There are some utilities for Windows floating around that allows you to do some graphical foo with LaTeX, but I have not explored them yet.

[madelf]

The PDF export in Open Office also seems to freak out over certain fonts, changing them into illegible gibberish.
I exported the same thing in PDF995, and it worked just fine.

Thought I'd share.

Which ones?

I've not encountered any problems, thus far, but then again I don't use a lot of fancy fonts.

It happened with Vivaldi (a scripty sort of font).
I was using it for chapter titles.
Couldn't say if it happens with any others, but that particular font did not consist of letters in the PDF.

[Kester Pelagius]

Greetings

The PDF export in Open Office also seems to freak out over certain fonts, changing them into illegible gibberish.

<...>

It happened with Vivaldi (a scripty sort of font).

I was using it for chapter titles.

Couldn't say if it happens with any others, but that particular font did not consist of letters in the PDF.

Dunno.  I just launched OpenOffice (Beta 1.1), native text document style type, and wrote the following in Vivaldi:

"This is a Title


   Once upon a time in the west there was a test test test test....

   la la la la la la la la la

   AaBbCcDd &tc ..."

Exported to PDF (optimized for screen) and the font output looked just fine, difficult to read, but then such is the font.

The obvious question (?):  Are you sure that you did not mix up your PDF995 and OpenOffice documents?

If not then. . . was the document created with OpenOffice or something you used OpenOffice to open and read?  If the latter that may be the problem.  So. . .

Try opening the document in something else then resaving it in another format OpenOffice can read and try again?




Kind Regards,

Kester Pelagius

[iago]

- LaTeX scares me. The tutorial is 143 pages long. It is, however, obscenely powerful and it does everything including feeding the cat. There are some utilities for Windows floating around that allows you to do some graphical foo with LaTeX, but I have not explored them yet.

It's also got a vast tendency to be massively inflexible.  It knows how you should be formatting things, and doesn't take any lip (except from people for whom the tutorial is childsplay).

I wouldn't recommend using it for gaming, ever.

[Clay]

LaTeX is outrageously inflexible, which is why I use it.  Best of all, you can control the things that it's inflexible about.  A Guide to LaTeX gets you going nicely, and has some excellent walk throughs showing how it can be customized.  The LaTeX Companion was helpful as well, but I don't know if it will be useful if you start with the other book.

If you work best with a WYSIWYG, it's totally not the tool for you. If you want nice looking output without a lot of effort and can live with its limitations, it's a great package.

[Emily_Dresner]

A quick note on Scribus:

I did get it up and working on my RedHat 9.0 box, and I found that the French tutorial had been translated to the English tutorial.  The tutorial is designed for Scribus 0.5.5, and I have 1.0.1.  

I've found Scribus to be remarkably difficult to use.  It could be my setup, or that the newest versions of Qt are incompatible, but it defaults to bizarre fonts, and keeps losing text on me.    If I accidentally unselect some text I am editing, I cannot seem to reselect it to edit it.

So, it's free.  But right now, I don't feel it is stable enough to do any serious work in it.  People on the mailing list claim you can do serious work in it, but unless there's a better font management piece of software for GNOME or Scribus works out its bugs, it's pretty unusable.

[max.lambertini]

- LaTeX scares me. The tutorial is 143 pages long. It is, however, obscenely powerful and it does everything including feeding the cat. There are some utilities for Windows floating around that allows you to do some graphical foo with LaTeX, but I have not explored them yet.

There's a less-known, slightly more user-friendly alternative to LaTex: ConTeXt, which is a set of macros more geared towards DTP instead of technical document. It's simpler, but nevertheless daunting for the beginner. I produced the italian translation of BRP rules with it. Pragma-Ade, the dutch guys that created this macroset, work wonder with these macros, however.

While powerful, I wouldn't suggest ConTeXt for the average amateur game publisher willing to use Linux as his/her production system. Neither do I suggest Scribus: while promising it's sorely lacking in user-friendliness, import capabilities and general stability.

Better stick with the latest release of OpenOffice.org. You can create surprisingly good layout with this tool, and you also get PDF export. (I know it's somehow faulty, but they're working on it)

Ciao,
Max


Ciao,
Max