Word Document => PDF file

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Has anyone any free/cheap suggestions for a program which can turn Word 2002 documents into PDFs? The “cheap” rules out Adobe Acrobat…
The documents are not complex, but contain colour and maybe a few GIFs. Reliabity would be a good plus!

Thanks

(Also see another PDF-maker request in the Publisher forum!)

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John–I tried to find some with no bugs–I might need them. I haven’t tried them. Hope at least one helps. Don’t forget to do a search in the lounge, esp. Word and Software Finds and Wants.

SMBP

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Adding one more to SMBP’s list from Brian Swann in his post on FreePDF.

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You might want to look at Gymnast (freeware). Haven’t tried it myself though. I have tried other freebies, but find that one of the significant issues is the size of the generated .pdfs. I believe there are several factors at play here, including whether extra fonts are embedded or not. Some file sizes I’ve ended up with have been staggering – this might be something to watch for.

Alan

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I love pdfFactory from FinePrint. It’s $50 basic or $100 Pro (haven’t tried the Pro). Its best feature is that you can print several jobs into a preview window and save them at the end as a single document. The preview window lets you delete single pages or whole jobs (to get those near-blank browser pages out and/or catch landscape pages that were supposed to be portrait, etc.). There are point releases every few months, and the upgrade process isn’t bad.

For infrequent users we install the free version of pdf995. The browser pop-ups would make me crazy, personally, but if use becomes more frequent, I suppose someone could come up with $10.

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Edited by WyllyWylly to add URL code. See the Quick Guide.[/i][/size]

Hi, I use WIN2PDF http://www.win2pdf.com[/url%5D about US$40 and it is super.

Ted

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Good Grief! I never imagined there could be so many products! Many thanks to all respondants – I will now have to take a couple of weeks off work to evaluate all these!

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What makes you think we’re done with you? There’s also ghostscript which has some command line tools which may be of interest to you (in your position as our resident Batch file writer), and if it wasn’t already mentioned you may want to wander through pdfzone.

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Hey John,
Thanks for volunteering to evaluate these . Post back your results.

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My boss said to rearrange these four words: JOKING BE MUST YOU…

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Tell ’em you’ll need to evaluate all those apps to be able to rearrange those four words.

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Ah, but first he must become an expert VBA programmer so that he can write a Word macro to get all possible combinations of the words.

Then, he must hire a linguistics consultant to determine which combinations make sense.

Heck, it would be a lot less expensive to buy Acrobat!

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Bernie, I also have played with PDF995 and it seems both single-step (prints to the PDF995 printer from Word/Publisher/etc creating a PDF file on disk), straightforward and effective.

The only niggles (to me) are that it sticks all its files in C:PDF995 (not in Program Files), and it blithely assume US Letter size paper, not noble British (well, european!) A4 size, but that’s a one-time change.

I don’t know how the resulting size of PDF files compares with any other converter, but for $0 and a load of annoying adverts in my browser, it seems a good deal – getting rid of the annoying adverts by registering is only $10.

I may compare it with JAWS PDF Creator, but that is more heavyweight, and more like Adobe Acrobat, both in features and price (ok, about 25%!), whereas I don’t need anything too complicated.

PS How did Howard know I was a linguist?!!

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John:
You can also download pdfEdit995 located at the same link. This little utility is used to set the defaults for page size, fonts, stationary, text page numbers, etc. Hopefully it will be of some help, but like you said, for ZERO dollars, it can’t be beat.

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I tried PDF Edit 995 but it took me quite some time to find its window under the plethora of adverts!

As far as I could see, there didn’t appear to be anything much I’d want to do to the PDF after I’d produced it, so I remain to be convinced about the usefulness of the edit program. Unless you can convince me otherwise?

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Check out DocuCom at http://www.zeon.com.tw/zeoncom/%5B/url%5D

DaveA I am so far behind, I think I am First
Genealogy....confusing the dead and annoying the living

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Just an FYI:
I downloaded “pdfEdit995” that was listed in the reply from SMBP. Creating PDFs No Acrobat II Been playing with it all afternoon & it appears to work good (using word doc, txt & html, & just about any thing I can find). Very easy to use,supports Windows 95, 98, 2000 and Me, NT 4.0 and XP. .

Its free, with one draw back: The free versions of pdf995 products will display a sponsor page in your web browser each time you run the software. If you would prefer not to see sponsor pages, you may upgrade by obtaining a license key at any time for $9.95.

However I found this to be no big deal. If it really bothers you spend the $10 (a lot cheaper than some of the others).

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Edited by WyllyWylly to add URL code. See the Quick Guide.[/i][/size]

JohnGray- you might want to check out the following link http://www.gohtm.com[/url%5D. From what I can see on the description page, besides registering, you may have ads added but it looks like the service is free.

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The product itself seems to be $49, and I’d prefer to buy something for my machine rather than rely on the continued existence of a web-based mechanism! But it seems a good suggestion! Thanks!

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