Hey, all. As as a quick search on "PDF" in this forum will show, there's a lot of information here on the Forge about how to produce a PDF on the cheap, none the least of which is Clinton's excellent article. It's been mentioned quite a few times that OpenOffice and Ghostscript are capable of producing PDFs for free, not to mention the "Postscript to PDF" site. And it's my understanding that MacOS X can save files as PDF from the "Print Preview".

Well, I wanted to start a thread to call attention to one of the better methods for producing cheap PDFs that I've found which doesn't seem to have gotten much attention, though Kester and Andrew Martin have mentioned it in a few threads: PDF995. I also wanted to discuss people's successes, tips, and tricks using PDF995 or any of the other methods mentioned above.

I downloaded PDF995 last night, and for Windows users, it's a wonderful and easy solution -- it creates a printer that outputs to PDF. Anything that can print can be used to produce a PDF. Last night I used it to produce a quickie PDF of Pretender, outputting it from Word. However, I could have just as easily outputted from Publisher or my web browser -- I tried outputting from Internet Exporer and it worked great.

The only problem I ran into was if I substituted TrueType Times Roman instead of allowing to use its built-in "Times" font, all the words were scrunchedtogetherlikethis, while if I used the "Times" font, it put a space after apostrophies, so you got text like this: I' ll go down before you' ll be there. I solved this by substituting Arial apostropies for Times apostropies (easy enough to do in Word with a search and replace).

Also, I had to make sure I paged through the document and looked at the pictures, making sure they loaded into memory, before they'd show up in the output.

However, these were minor problems that only took a bit of tinkering to fix them. Plus, the biggest problem with free PDF production is you can't use some of the nicer features like bookmarks or linking, but there's a companion program for PDF995 called PDFEdit995 that fixes this problem.

However, there is a relevant lesson here for those who want to do things cheap: Usually it takes a little more effort. If you're not willing to put in a bit of time to make sure everything works okay while tinkering with a free product, you're better off paying the money for the full version of Acrobat.

The only other problem -- which others have mentioned -- is a nag screen pops up in your browser when you use it, unless you pay a little cash to make it go away. However, it's very innocuous -- it doesn't flash and it dosn't contain pop-up ads, just a simple nag. I may give the authors money because I like the program so much, but not just to make the nag go away -- if I was more strapped for cash, it wouldn't be a big deal at all.

What have other people's experiences been in terms of producing PDFs on the cheap?

Greetings xiombarg,

xiombarg wrote: The only problem I ran into was if I substituted TrueType Times Roman instead of allowing to use its built-in "Times" font, all the words were scrunchedtogetherlikethis <...>

Also, I had to make sure I paged through the document and looked at the pictures, making sure they loaded into memory, before they'd show up in the output.

However, these were minor problems that only took a bit of tinkering to fix them. Plus, the biggest problem with free PDF production is you can't use some of the nicer features like bookmarks or linking, but there's a companion program for PDF995 called PDFEdit995 that fixes this problem.

<...>

What have other people's experiences been in terms of producing PDFs on the cheap?

I tried outputting from Internet Exporer and it worked great.

madelf wrote:

I tried outputting from Internet Exporer and it worked great.

Now that's interesting.
So a document can be put together as a website and then printed to a PDF? How would pagebreaks and such be handled? Using tables to define the area of each page?

I've been using pdf995 with the Microsoft Works word processor that came with my computer & I've noticed no problems with TT Times Roman (using the default properties).
Maybe it depends on the program that's doing the output?

madelf wrote:

I tried outputting from Internet Exporer and it worked great.

Now that's interesting.
So a document can be put together as a website and then printed to a PDF? How would pagebreaks and such be handled? Using tables to define the area of each page?

What these things do is a "virtual print run". So you would, I expect, get an output much like if you pressed PRNTSCRN while looking at a page, except to a file instead of hardcopy.

Greetings,

contracycle wrote: I tried outputting from
What these things do is a "virtual print run". So you would, I expect, get an output much like if you pressed PRNTSCRN while looking at a page, except to a file instead of hardcopy.

Kester Pelagius wrote: Well, ok, it's not that bad. It's just like if you tried to print the thread out.

A note for those using Unix or Linux... Scribus, a free DTP program, has reached its 1.0 version this month. It can create PDFs with font embedding, form fill-in, and even encryption.

The Scribus website:

http://web2.altmuehlnet.de/fschmid/

Scribus docs on the web, in English (developer is German):

http://www.atlantictechsolutions.com/scribusdocs/topics.html

--Travis

Much thanks for the tip on Scribus. That should completely kill my productivity for days.

xiombarg wrote: Hey, all. As as a quick search on "PDF" in this forum will show, there's a lot of information here on the Forge about how to produce a PDF on the cheap, none the least of which is Clinton's excellent article. It's been mentioned quite a few times that OpenOffice and Ghostscript are capable of producing PDFs for free, not to mention the "Postscript to PDF" site. And it's my understanding that MacOS X can save files as PDF from the "Print Preview".

Well, I wanted to start a thread to call attention to one of the better methods for producing cheap PDFs that I've found which doesn't seem to have gotten much attention, though Kester and Andrew Martin have mentioned it in a few threads: PDF995. I also wanted to discuss people's successes, tips, and tricks using PDF995 or any of the other methods mentioned above.

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.

madelf wrote: 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.

Hey --

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.

I downloaded and after several days and an epic battle with Qt and Mesa, I got Scribus 1.0.1 to build and install on my RedHat 9.0 box. I haven't had a chance to read the documentation and work with it yet. I'm having the usual problems with fonts and Linux and installing of fonts and Linux, so the system isn't as stable as I'd like yet. Now, on the Scribus page, they do have a highly entertaining article on KDE/Cygwin and building Scribus under Cygwin to get it working for Windows 2000/XP. However, the KDE port looks terrible, so even if I got it working, Scribus may just churn out utter garbage. I'm joining the development list to read what they're doing, but from what I see, mostly they're busy porting the documentation to various languages instead of working on stability and tools. I honestly cannot attest to its stability and usability yet. Perhaps in a week.

For now, it looks like the free tools are more than adequate. My main issue is my inability to do anything visually artistic. For the not as technically proficient as I, you're basically screwed when it comes to getting the free tools to work, because they don't work without at least a little bit of a fight.

Acrobat has a LOT of font problems; they may carry over to some of the related products (cannot speak for anything on Linux). One thing worth trying when you are getting font substitution is to install PostScript-capable print driver on your machine as a dummy printer. Becuase the system is doing a "virtual print run", the absence of PostScript device drivers may cause hiccups.

Right now I'm doing layout in Serif PagePlus (version 6) and printing to PDF995. It's been working wonderfully. I may end up buying the PDF capable PagePlus 8, but for only a $10 expenditure my current setup is working much better than I expected.

-Chris

Greetings,

Emily_Dresner wrote: 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.

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.

(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.

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.

Greetings

madelf wrote:
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.

Emily_Dresner wrote: - 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.

LaTeX is outrageously inflexible, which is why I use it. Best of all, you can control the things that it's inflexible about. [Url=http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0201398257/104-4940836-6615132]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.

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.

Emily_Dresner wrote: - 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.