STJLabs

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Converting to PDF

January
29

Digital documents are created with many different programs. Many of my students use various versions of MS Office and some use Open Office. Others use Mac Pages and some use Wordpad. Over the years I have become pretty good at dealing with just about any kind of file format that’s thrown at me. I know lots of work-arounds and small tricks to deal with esoteric file formats that I am sure to run into almost daily.

I’ve also run into this problem from the other side. I’ve created documents for distribution that people on the receiving end haven’t been able to deal with. This has happened when I’ve sent out Office2007 (docx) files, as well as Pages documents.

One file format that is almost “universally openable” is PDF, or portable document format. Pages can export to pdf and so can some other document creation tools, but for the most part you have to jump through some hoops or pay some money to convert your document to PDF. If you do a search for “PDF conversion tools” you’ll come across LOTS of tools that are chalked full of crap, very poorly written, full of spyware, or all of those things.

Well, I stopped searching about 6 months ago when I came across two very useful and free pdf creation tools:

The first tool I found was PDFOnline. All you have to do is upload your document through their webpage and specify an email address. The uploaded document will be converted to PDF without and sort of embeded logo and emailed to the specified account. In my experience it never took more than 10 minutes for a document to be converted. (The larger the document the longer the conversion time.) PDFOnline is particularly useful on locked down systems where you can’t install the next option…

The second tool I found is the VERY useful CutePDF Writer printer driver. After you install the driver, you can create PDF documents from any application that you can print from. All you need to do is print to the printer driver (which will show up as a printer) and a save-as screen will pop up allowing you to save your new PDF document anywhere you want. Good stuff.