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Free, high quality PDF converter?

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 2:08 am
by Perica
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Re:Free, high quality PDF converter?

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 2:20 am
by Rich
I bought Acrobat Pro last summer... a wonderful program. Actually I bought Creative Suite to get Photoshop and it came with Acrobat. Damn, what a great bundle. I think I use all those programs... except perhaps InDesign and GoLive. What's that about?

If I see anything free and legal, I'll let you know.

Re:Free, high quality PDF converter?

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 5:25 am
by Pype.Clicker
under linux, virtually every program can print to a PostScript file ... Then we have ps2pdf in the pstools package (iirc) ...

Maybe if you install a (fake) postscript printer and find the ps2pdf for windows (with cygwin project, it shouldn't be *that* hard), it'll do the trick ...

Re:Free, high quality PDF converter?

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 5:55 am
by Candy
You can also use OpenOffice for converting to PDF (which is standard... File -> Export to PDF). While you're at it, dunk Microsoft office out the window and use OO for everything :) (and save $800+ or a criminal offense on it too).

Re:Free, high quality PDF converter?

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 8:33 am
by Eero Ränik
Acrobat + Distiller. Of course they are expensive as hell... But yes, printing to a *.ps file and converting to *.pdf would do the trick, or exporting it to PDF with OpenOffice.org, which I wouldn't do though (of course I'm used to printing my PDFs in printhouses, they have some special requirements for prepress, but I believe it's not the case).
Candy: Well, if you've bought Microsoft Office already, throwing it out of the window wouldn't be very smart. Although I don't like OO very much, if I would have to choose between using a pirated copy of MSO, or OO, I'd choose the latter.

Re:Free, high quality PDF converter?

Posted: Mon Dec 06, 2004 9:36 am
by Candy
Eero R?nik wrote: Candy: Well, if you've bought Microsoft Office already, throwing it out of the window wouldn't be very smart. Although I don't like OO very much, if I would have to choose between using a pirated copy of MSO, or OO, I'd choose the latter.
You could sell it and donate whatever's left of the $800 (not much probably, don't see anybody paying that amount for such software) to the OO foundation? That'd get them a lot further too...

Re:Free, high quality PDF converter?

Posted: Wed Dec 08, 2004 6:17 am
by Solar
Pype.Clicker wrote: Maybe if you install a (fake) postscript printer and find the ps2pdf for windows (with cygwin project, it shouldn't be *that* hard), it'll do the trick ...
Been there, done that, works like a charm:

- set up a PS printer that prints to a file;

- call up your shell (Cygwin with ghostscript package installed if you're under Windows), and "ps2pdf {filename}".

There you have your PDF file. There is also pdf2ps for converting PDF back, and ps2ascii, ps2html etc. etc. for further processing.

As for "high quality"... that basically depends on the fonts you have installed... ;)