Print to PDF in Windows XP without installing anything and not being an admin?

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At work we are running Windows XP Pro and I am not an administrator. I regularly have to print documents to take with me and I'd rather print them to a PDF and load them directly on my Android phone than carrying around a paper copy.

Is there any way to print to PDF without having administrator access? Also, I'm not looking for Open Office's export to PDF function, I want it to be a printer so any program that can print can access it. Could I run something like this off of a thumb drive?

Edit: What about printing to a file? Doesn't xp natively support postscript printing? Then the second part to that would be easily converting the .ps file to a PDF. This would basically only add one step to the process I'm trying to achieve above. Is this possible without admin privileges?

Edit 2: I should have mentioned, we don't have access to the internet, and I can't save my documents in any way. I can only print. That's why I want to print to a file, so I can save it.

matt

Posted 2010-11-08T04:20:29.233

Reputation: 1 331

Answers

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Firstly, your question says “without installing anything and not being an admin”. That makes most of this answers off topic, but let me join them because my answer is better.

This answer uniquely

Use RedMon with GhostScript. RedMon essentially redirects a printer port to a program; GhostScript is a program that generates normalized PostScript®.

You can find RedMon here with more information about it.

Evan Carroll

Posted 2010-11-08T04:20:29.233

Reputation: 1

Following the installation instructions leads the user to run setup.exe which, as the instructions explicitly say, requires administrator privileges.

– LondonRob – 2017-03-20T15:20:26.883

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You can't add a printer without administrative rights. The only way I know of to do this is to install software like CutePDF or the export function within Open Office or Microsoft Office.

MHrappstead

Posted 2010-11-08T04:20:29.233

Reputation: 551

1Don't use CutePDF. That's nagware IIRC. Use something that's open-source and truly free like PDFCreator. – frabjous – 2010-11-08T04:39:59.587

2@frabjous: PDFCreator installs an adware toolbar. I use Bullzip at home and it's clean but I need to find some way to do this without the ability to install software. – matt – 2010-11-08T04:42:56.367

@MHrappstead You think I could run CutePDF/PDFCreator/Bullzip on my thumb drive? – matt – 2010-11-08T04:43:52.357

It's way overkill, but you can run qemu from a thumbdrive and have a machine to which you DO have admin access. I had to do this to do some labs for school where they did "deepfreeze" on the computers without configuring the applications properly and it kept resetting options on the locally installed software to broken. again way overkill – RobotHumans – 2010-11-08T05:12:03.803

I couldn't see you being able to use CutePDF, PDFCreator, or Bullzip straight off a thumb drive. I've never tried what aking1012 suggests but it sounds like a fun project to try out one day. Would you be able to give us some more information about why you don't have administrative rights. I'm pretty sure I know why but I don't want to make any assumptions. If we had a little more information we might be able to find a workaround to your problem. – MHrappstead – 2010-11-08T14:23:41.000

Only 2 people have admin rights... my boss who knows nothing about computers (he still uses ie6) but is a control freak. Anytime he needs anything fixed he has me do it but logs me in and out on his account. Its not that he doesn't trust me with admin privileged, he doesn't want to be cut out of the loop. (The other admin is a regional IT support guy) Where I work is a small office so I'm not dealing with a big corp IT infrastructure, but it is still a pain in the a$$ to get anything changed. I would not be violating any laws or policies by circumventing it... – matt – 2010-11-08T17:22:05.537

...I'm just avoiding a the bureaucracy and the inconvenience of trying to get the change implemented. – matt – 2010-11-08T17:22:59.560

@aking1012, would that work if the program I am printing from is still on the network where I'm a lowly user? – matt – 2010-11-08T17:23:58.293

See my edit with a follow-up question – matt – 2010-11-08T17:31:50.577

It's been awhile since I used PDFCreator, or Windows for that matter, but I don't recall it installing any adware, at least not that you couldn't unselect when installing. But you can create a PDF printer just using ghostscript if you want.http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSWriter/GSWriter.html

– frabjous – 2010-11-08T18:58:02.363

He wants a solution where you install nothing! xp doesn't have anything inbuilt. – Matt H – 2010-11-08T21:20:01.353

http://cl.ly/2V3V3S3j2V1s1u0U3K2V - PDFCreator is, sadly, adware. You may opt out, but it's easy to miss. Screen grab from final page of installer (ignore the OSX Chrome, I copied it via Preview). You can uncheck the Babylon boxes and/or decline their license; PDFCreator will still be installed. – Chris Burgess – 2012-05-09T23:35:13.117

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There are some online resources that you can use, if security is not a concern. Check out http://www.pdfonline.com And perhaps there are Android applications that can read your documents natively or in some other (easy to export) format?

Scott E.

Posted 2010-11-08T04:20:29.233

Reputation: 29

This is the only answer that meets the "without installing anything" and "not being an admin" +1. Although, you may not like passing your docs to an online service. – Matt H – 2010-11-08T21:18:17.457

I forgot to mention that we have no access to the internet on our workstations. The other issue is that with the primary software I'm using there's no way to save documents. It just prints reports to the printer. We used to have OneNote on our computers and I could print to onenote then put the page on my thumb drive but we got new computers and they have failed to reload office. – matt – 2010-11-08T22:39:27.543

Asked: 2010-11-08T04:20:29.233

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Active: 2013-01-18T16:43:32.123