Having tried a bunch of PDF writers like Acrobat Standard itself, and PDF Creator, PDF 995, Desktop PDF etc, many of which sit as Acrobat Distiller printer modules, here is a simple tip.
Simple. Get Open Office (download for free), open your Microsoft Office file, and “Export as PDF”. Done.
It works superfast, no need to muck about with printer options, no Acrobat-like updates or missing DLLs or your typical bag of ancillary woes, and some pretty snazzy options about lossless or JPEG compression. The PDFs created are pretty lean too.
Open Office of course has a bunch of other benefits and a nearly MS-Office-like interface, but that’s for another day.
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As apposed to doing a large install of the open office an getting hung up with a Java install. I use PDFCreator (Found on sourceforge) an free software which easily creates PDFs from any Windows program. Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application.
I also use the Foxit Reader a free PDF reader that is
PDF Creator is a good option until it isn’t. I tried generating the PDF of a Powerpoint presentation with images and stuff, only 31 slides, and it croaked. Asked me to reinstall printer drivers. What caused this? Not sure, could be a bunch of things, but I don’t have the time or patience to troubleshoot. I just want it to work. It is probably a good solution for smaller files, and it does work fine with 3-4 page Word files, but is significantly slower than the Export feature of Open Office.
On the other hand, I opened the aforementioned ppt in Open Office’s Impress, and exported. Had my PDF file in less than 20 seconds, everything (fonts etc) intact. Yes, it’s probably a bloatware install if *in addition* to MS Office, but I’m testing the possibility of getting rid of MS Office altogether. Open Office is smaller than MS Office, gives me all the functionality, and does so across operating systems (my other machines are Red Hat and SuSE).
Foxit was fun as a reader too, I recommended it on this very site, but the interface was just not fun. Plus, it jumbled sophisticated fonts — they did not look the same. Now that Adobe Reader 7.0.7 is speedy enough I don’t bother with Foxit.
Thanks for the pointers though, it’s always fun to try alternatives!
OO is better than PDF creator, but it is a huge install and lots of stuff you don’t need if you already have a Microsoft install in place. Other utilities have free trials such as this PDF Writer that have been tuned for Office and offer support/etc. PDF zone provides a lot of insight into this space.
>Roger
no html support – try http://www.docudesk.com or http://www.PDFc.com for alternatives
CutePDF for PDF’s
Paperless Printer for PDF+ lots other formats
Open Office is great, but who has the time to download it all on dial-up? For those who need only the occasional PDF a far better option is to do a PDF online via the Adobe site.
An open office install is big but lets go to the topic for another day.
Open Office is free (as in beer and speech). It has a few features I only noticed till yesterday (after using my girlfriend’s laptop) that word doesn’t.
It supports a lot more formats (including word) and works a treat. It does use up a bit of memory, bit I can put up with it, 128 meg of ram still costs less than MS Word.
I have been using Primo PDF, and it works well.
I’ve been using Primo PDF also and it works well. It also has some options that can be useful to create your PDF document.
PDF Creator is the best one among those mentioned. I think installing OpenOffice for PDF is a bit round-about. If possible, get Adobe Professional as it makes the smallest and most-featured files (you have many options) otherwise PDF Creator is good.
I don’t know how good PDF Creator was at the time, but I’ve been using it for the past several months at work, and it works GREAT. I’ve been “printing” out many-page documents (and many of them at a time) without a hitch on a low 800Mhz 256MB RAM system. Has some interesting and useful options, some which OOo has, some which they share, and some which only PDF Creator has.