Sunday, September 9, 2007

Producing PDFs on Windows for Free

If you need to produce a PDF for your homework, and are running Windows. There is a combination of two open source applications that will help. The main PDF generation is done by ghostscript, which has been ported from Linux to Windows. Make sure you install ghostscript first. The second program is PDFCreator, which creates a virtual printer. The virtual printer appears as a normal Window's printer. To produce a PDF, you just need to print your document as usual with PDFCreator as the target. The output from the printer is a PDF file, which you can then treat as any other PDF file.

I have tested with with MS Office, and it does produce a PDF file that the standard Adobe reader can handle.

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