Tips&Tricks Printing PDF files in Open/Star Office

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delboy711

Senior user

Joined: 03 May 2002

Posts: 412

Location: Wokingham, UK

 

Post Posted: Tue Jul 30, 2002 11:46 am Post subject: Printing PDF files in Open/Star Office

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Printing to PDF Files - Take 1

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When you want to print a PDF file from Open/StarOffice the obvious way of doing it would appear to be to select 'Print', select the tick box to 'Print to File', and then select PDF as the file type.

 

The file is then written and when you click on the file in konqueror, and your text appears in front of you no problem..

 

WRONG

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By following that procedure you have just created a POSTSCRIPT file, not a PDF file. It is easy to be fooled because the default viewer will display both Postscript and PDF files.

 

Printing to PDF Files - Take 2

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OK. If that is not going to work how about this... You open a root terminal and navigate to the Open/StarOffice executable files. (For Open Office this is /usr/lib/openoffice/program)

 

Then as root you start the configuration utility with ./spadmin A dialogue box appears which offers to let you add a printer. You select 'New Printer' and a dialogue box offers to let you add a 'PDF converter' You are offered the 'default driver' 'Adobe Distiller', or 'another driver' Well you do not have Adobe Distiller since it costs big bucks so you select the default.

 

You are now invited to select the command to drive pdf files. Use this one :-

 

/usr/bin/gs -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile="(OUTFILE)" -

 

and give ~/ as the target directory.

 

Now select a name for this new printer and you are finished.

 

Now when you print from Star/Open Office you will have a new printer available, and so long as you have saved the document first you can print to PDF.

 

Unfortunately the output will always be called (OUTFILE)

 

Printing to PDF Files - Take 3

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So this brings us to my preferred method of printing to PDF files.

 

Run ./spadmin as before and create a new Printer, but declare it to be a normal Printer and in the command line to invoke the printer put qtcups --stdin (OR: If you have KDE3 you can use kprinter --stdin)

 

Give the printer a name and you are done.

 

Now when you print to this printer you are presented with the standard CUPS printer selection dialogue box which allows you to print to any CUPS printer in your network including the PDF pseudo printer supplied by KDE. Selecting the KDE PDF pseudo printer allows you to pick a file name for your pdf file, and then it prints.

 

Very Happy

 

The same qtcups printer will also allow you to print directly to fax. But setting that up will be the subject of another Tip. Last edited by delboy711 on Tue Aug 06, 2002 1:17 pm, edited 1 time in total

 

 

tobyink

Frequent user

Joined: 08 May 2002

Posts: 185

Location: London, England

Post Posted: Sun Aug 04, 2002 7:53 pm Post subject:

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There's also a nice utility ps2pdf which is part of the GhostScript package. It's pretty easy to use:

 

ps2pdf INPUT_FILE_NAME OUTPUT_FILE_NAME

 

 

 

Editor's note: This thread was originally posted at the old MUB (Mandrake User Board at club-nihil). This post is the result of a 99% automatic backup, so due to its nature some text may be lost (improbable but possible).