beral

Anyone can please reccomend any good pdf writer software products?
I am looking for an easy way to convert documents ( pictures, data sheets, word, excel ) to pdfs. There are many products around ( lower cost alternative to Adobe Acrobat ) but of what I tried so far each of them have some annoyances.

cyberdude

you can use freeware like primopdf to print - from any program - to a pdf printer it creates which then creates the output as a pdf document on you computer.

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BaDZeD

Or get OpenOffice.org, their office can open all MS documents and convert them to PDF in one click (oh yeah, and its free - cant beat the price )

phreakonaleash

Huzzahs to OpenOffice :-)

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Joel

Invest in a Mac. OS X has PDF support built-in. Just print (yes, print) a document, click the PDF button, then choose save as PDF.

phreakonaleash

Or if you aren't a Mac-phile like yourself, try open office or http://naramcheez.paraschopra.com/pdfproducer.php

Just a quickee search but seems nice.

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cyberdude

Or, like I said, if you are not a MAC person and already have an office suite, or don't want to deal with open office, just install PrimoPDF and print from any app.

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_Em

Just remember... PDF is a container format, and there are 5 or so versions, each of which can hold a number of different kinds of data.

If you're planning to do graphic layouts for a magazine, you will probably want different tools from someone who is archiving large amounts of text.

PDFs can store images in PostScript, TIFF, and JPEG image formats, and can compress the images using ZIP and JPEG (lossy) compression.

The default Quartz rendering on MacOS X is indeed PDF -- it complies with the PDF 1.4 spec, and images are saved as either uncompressed TIFF, or as PostScript. Unfortunately, printing to PDF in OS X provides no means to control how colour should be adjusted between the RGB and CYMK colourspaces, and it also does a very bad job at flattening transparent layers.

I ended up using an opensource PDF print driver and post-processing the data using PStill to get the final PDFs to look like what I wanted, using the compression I wanted. Every other method I've tried (other than using Adobe CS2) created documents that would not display the same on every computer, would look significantly different when printed (due to being RGB, not CYMK), and would be horribly bloated for sharing via email etc, as everything is stored at original resolution and dpi.

Oh yes, and I second PrimoPDF for Windows users -- it doesn't help with colourspace issues or flattening, but it does allow you some control over compression level, etc.

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Joel

I wonder if beral is reading all these at all?

philpalm

Not only if he is reading it, will he comment back? or Maybe it is a spam set-up?

On another similar topic is Picsel reader the reader of Acrobat(Pdf) files the choice of only Sony users? A dumb question which acrobat versions are unreadable by Picsel?