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20061220 Wednesday December 20, 2006

Convert A Document Into PDF By Printing It

I thought I'd try to knock off one of the entries in the I Want A Freeware Utility To ..." post I put out yesterday.

Namely "C.4. Convert a document into PDF".

I've been reading the Ubuntu Hacks book recently, and hack #26 (Make Your Own PDFs) seemed to be exactly what I wanted. For those without the book, this was discussed in one of the Ubuntu forums and a slightly modified version of the instructions can be found here.

Note that it seems that some applications (gedit for example), already have a nice "Create a PDF Document" option available in their Print dialog. Presumably this is standard GNOME. Cups-pdf is for those that don't (such as Firefox).

One down. About 143 to go. I'll update the webpage in the new year.

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( Dec 20 2006, 10:10:29 AM PST ) [Listen] Permalink Comments [9]

Comments:

I tossed a comment in your earlier blog entry with some possible tips to look through with what you probably already have installed. Can't help you much with SUSE if you are using one of the distributions based on that, but .deb and .rpm packages are usually managed by a tool you already have, and you should be able to search for the various keywords in your list to fill in the blanks.

Hope this is helpful.

-Rusty

Posted by Rusty on December 20, 2006 at 02:20 PM PST #

Hi Rusty.

Yes, I saw that. Thanks. Nowadays I mainly use Ubuntu, so your previous comment really helps.

After nate's "rant" yesterday, I'll ber adding a couple entries to section A of my list in the new year.

Posted by Rich Burridge on December 20, 2006 at 03:07 PM PST #

The one caveat worth keeping in mind is that such utilities can't (currently) be counted on to generate a nice, properly tagged PDF that screen readers can get at.

OOo/StarOffice seems to do a pretty decent job.

Posted by joanie on December 20, 2006 at 03:55 PM PST #

Hi Joanie. True. And another thing that's annoying me at the moment is that cups-pdf doesn't setup hyperlinks in the generated PDF. I really want that facility. So I guess I'm still looking.

Posted by Rich Burridge on December 20, 2006 at 04:12 PM PST #

Rich, you will not find any all-purpose PDF tool that will give you hyper links. All purpose would mean a PDF printer driver. If you print, you can't send information for hyper links and other stuff. So I guess the best multi-purpose tool for PDF is really OOo, because it supports a lot of different formats...

Posted by Malte Timmermann on December 21, 2006 at 02:30 AM PST #

Hi Malte. Yup, I'd reasoned that out. By the time cups-pdf get's its hands on the bits, the links are gone. OOo does do a lot of what I want. Does it write accessible PDF?

I also found html2pdf and I'm going to give that a try. It's mainly a need to convert some web pages to "book" PDF format that I want this for, and I need something that can be run from a script. OOo doesn't do that.

Posted by Rich Burridge on December 21, 2006 at 07:58 AM PST #

Rich, OOo writes good accessible PDF since 2.0. You should also check the option "write tagged PDF". Unfortunately this is not the default, because of file size. You should also be able to use OOo for your web site conversion, in case the HTML import is good enough. OOo supports http URLs. You work on Orca OOo accessibility scripts, you should know how to script OOo ;)

Posted by Malte Timmermann on December 21, 2006 at 09:03 AM PST #

I'm the CUPS-PDF maintainer for Debian and Ubuntu. Most of the problems with stripped URI and missing glyphs in Asian languages are because of the PostScript back-end, not because of CUPS-PDF itself. See Debian Bug #387752 for a discussion of the issues and possible solutions.

Posted by Martin-Éric on December 21, 2006 at 03:37 PM PST #

Hi Martin-Éric. Thanks for the pointer.

Posted by Rich Burridge on December 21, 2006 at 05:37 PM PST #

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