How to print documents to pdf

I like to print PDFs of my documents. I've been using PDFCreator. Is this a good choice, are there any better solutions?

Artur Carvalho

Posted 2009-07-15T09:25:09.510

Reputation: 1 617

http://www.cogniview.com/cc-free-pdf-converter is my favorite one to date. It's based on GhostScript, but installs as printer driver, which is a requirement for a legacy use case for me. – polemon – 2016-09-07T19:18:52.433

Maybe you could give us some details on what you mean by "better". Better quality, more features, or what? – Christian Davén – 2009-07-15T09:36:56.240

Answers

CutePDF Writer is working well for us (way less flaky than the slightly old version of Acrobat we are running at work, anyway)

EDIT: There is also information in the CutePDF FAQ about using parameters to change the print quality/file size settings which we have found useful for larger documents.

fourstar

Posted 2009-07-15T09:25:09.510

Reputation: 633

4We've found it is better at generating PDFs from Crystal reports than Crystal Reports itself... – Rowland Shaw – 2009-07-15T20:03:39.157

6@Rowland: then again, writing the binary yourself would probably be better than using Crystal Reports' 'functionality'... – Andy Mikula – 2009-07-15T20:20:27.710

Thank you! Total life saver! I had to save a form that was supposed to be displayed as pdf, but Chrome didn't recognize it as such. CutePDF did exactly what I needed :) – Sverre Rabbelier – 2011-03-10T23:07:27.493

+1 Doesn't bug you like some options. – Daniel A. White – 2009-07-16T12:52:49.847

I prefer PDFCreator over the other tools. Much more flexibility than the others but probably is an overkill for simple purposes.

kartikmohta

Posted 2009-07-15T09:25:09.510

Reputation: 586

PDFCreator is my favorite as well. – Justin Dearing – 2009-07-31T13:04:42.597

I had two problems with PDFCreator: If im printing something like a presentation, the margins are white. Maybe there is an option to change that.

Rhe other is that sometimes I cant find the save dialog box. And when it appears, there is a list of all the pdf prints Ive ordered. – Artur Carvalho – 2009-07-16T18:21:33.260

1The margins are white because your presentation software has a print margin set. If you use borderless printing (assuming the software supports it) you'll get PDFs with no border. – AnonJr – 2009-07-17T11:45:56.743

I love that PDFCreator will let you create the end result in more than one format, and you can use it to "merge" multiple documents into one PDF - great if you have different people working on different chapters of a user manual... – AnonJr – 2009-07-17T11:49:02.180

Using the built-in Export to PDF option in OpenOffice.org has one VERY major advantage over anything that simulates a printer: it creates clickable table of contents, cross-references, indexes and explicit internet links. Of course, most PDF viewers will recognise some URLs and email addresses. But when linking some text to some URL, most PDF printers do not make that into a clickable link. That's simply because the print processor does not "tell" the PDF printer about this.

As a side note: on a Mac, PDF is very much integrated. Still, when using OpenOffice.org on a Mac, one should also explicitly use Export to PDF -- using the Save to PDF option from a Mac's print dialog does not create clickable links. However, some other Mac programs do in fact somehow send such information to the Mac's print processor, through the print dialog. For example, when saving to PDF using the print dialog in Pages, Safari or OmniWeb (the latter being non-Apple software), all links are in fact clickable. (On a Mac, when one does NOT want clickable links when saving a web site as PDF, one should in fact use Firefox instead.)

By the way: getting a clickable table of contents is a very good reason to learn how to use styles and headers. One should never have to create a table of contents manually!

Arjan

Posted 2009-07-15T09:25:09.510

Reputation: 29 084

Yeah, Macs have fantastic PDF support. And using the new trackpads to zoom in and out (or even rotate) is really great. – Artur Carvalho – 2009-07-16T18:22:44.367

If it's Office 2007 applications that you're printing from, there's an add-in to provide a Save as PDF option:

Office 2007 Save as PDF Add-in

Sliff

Posted 2009-07-15T09:25:09.510

Reputation: 1 297

Any idea if this creates clickable table of contents, cross-references and so on? – Arjan – 2009-07-15T10:17:34.643

Yes, I've used it for converting a number of technical manuals I've authored with large tables of contents and lots of cross references, and these were all clickable in the resultant PDF. – Sliff – 2009-07-15T11:14:17.330

I used primo pdf since a while, and it works great

Davide Vosti

Posted 2009-07-15T09:25:09.510

Reputation: 151

Yup; use this all the time. – Steve Melnikoff – 2009-07-15T20:18:38.603

I use doPDF and it is very successful. And free...

doPDF installs itself as a virtual PDF printer driver so after a successful installation will appear in your Printers and Faxes list. To convert to PDF, you just have to print the document to doPDF.

spinodal

Posted 2009-07-15T09:25:09.510

Reputation: 1 293

I use pdf995. Shareware, but the license isn't too expensive and it works really nicely. Also has the ability to split and merge pdfs, add watermarks and more.

Mark Pim

Posted 2009-07-15T09:25:09.510

Reputation: 1 574

I use it too, it has good quality, it's great if you don't mind the ads – djeidot – 2009-07-15T22:27:23.647

I used to use it too, but the adds are pretty annoying. Switched to CutePDF – kristof – 2009-07-16T11:28:24.847

OpenOffice is another option.

Mercer Traieste

Posted 2009-07-15T09:25:09.510

Reputation: 2 112

Another option (the one I used to use until all the other programs listed here came out) is to install a printer driver for a Postscript printer, connected to the FILE: port.

When you print to that printer, you'll get a postscript (.ps) file. You can then open that using Ghostscript and Ghostview and convert them to PDF from there.