Creating pdf files

[mariodebono]

Does anyone know of a good piece of software that will convert documents such as Open Office files into pdf format?[/b]

[qnr]

I thought OpenOffice did. Guess not. As a quick fix, you might want to "Print to file" filename.ps and then run ps2pdf filename.ps

 

There are scores of programs out there that will create pdfs. See if this works though.

[mtweidmann]

MDK ships with a pdf printer installed, although it might only work under KDE I'm not sure. Run any app that can print to a CUPS printer and in the listy of avilable printer should be a pdf printer. Select that print, print, and you have a nice pdf file sitting in your user directory.

[mtweidmann]

Oh and OpenOffice also has its own pdf file generator, but only in the more recent versions.

[mariodebono]

Thanks for your help guys. I'm new to MDK and Linux so I'm still finding out new things everyday. :lol:

[Guest BooYah]

Previous versions of Open office can make pdf's. You have to go through the print dialogoue though, as in mtweidemann's messsage.

 

File->Print-> then select the PDF converter for your printer and it'll print into a file.

[paleo]

previous versions (i.e. before 1.1b) seem to make huge pdf files though - at least i haven't been able to make them much smaller than about half of a ps file. 1.1b's pdf export functions makes reasonably small pdf files.

[aRTee]

Size of pdf's often depends on the quality (screen or press) and whether there are any bitmaps involved. If there are, press will give a much bigger file than screen...

[paleo]

Size of pdf's often depends on the quality (screen or press) and whether there are any bitmaps involved. If there are, press will give a much bigger file than screen...

i know. but i'm talking about the *relative* size of the pdf file to the size of the ps file produced from the same file. It does not matter whether I use press or screen. when i use oo.org 1.0, the resulting pdf file is a little less than half of the post script file generated from the same text file. This is a bit large. I don't get such humongous pdf files when using OO1.1b. It could very well be that some of my settings in OO1.0 aren't right - I actually don't fully understand the printing dialog in OO (I can print, don't worry about that; it's the small things)

[aRTee]

Hmmm, could you mention actual sizes?

 

Like: 3 page document, text only, 25KB in .ps format and 14KB in .pdf....?

 

If you have no images, .ps is actually not extremely large format; btw you can read it, it's just ascii, formatting info and text.. (unlike .pdf)

[paleo]

Hmmm. I must be doing something wrong. I just converted a 23,936byte OO document to PS and to PDF and I got results even worse than I was complaining about. It's 22 pages and text only.

 

The results in OO1.0:

 

ps: 934,046 Bytes

pdf (screen): 934,050 Bytes

pdf (press): 934,045 Bytes

 

The results in OO1.1b:

 

ps: 558,837 Bytes

pdf (screen): 214,553 Bytes

pdf (printer): 218,605 Bytes

pdf (press): 213,112 Bytes

 

 

First, OO1.0 seems to create pdf files that are just as big as the ps files. Something must be wrong with the settings. I'm not even sure that these are pdf files any longer. How can I tell? What are the tell-tale headers or whatever of pdf files? They all look the same to me when I peek into them with an editor.

In OO1.0b both the pdf and ps files are significantly smaller but: why is pdf(press) the smallest? Shouldn't it be the biggest? The pdf files strikes me as still a bit largish given that the file is text only. I'm pretty sure I've seen better results using OO1.1b.

[aRTee]

Strange that the text only files are about the same size in .ps and .pdf; .pdf should use compression and that should help a lot in reducing file size.

 

If a file is .pdf or .ps: check the header:

head [filename].ps (or .pdf)

if it's postscript, it will tell you in the first couple of lines.

 

Maybe konqueror will also tell you what type it is; and I can imagine there are straightforward linux/unix commands that give info on a file, I just don't know them.

 

In any case, if a file is not postscript, but you can open it in kghostview it's a pdf, since those are the only formats (afaik) that kghostview reads.

 

The 'no-filesize-difference' with screen, printer and press (yes, to me I would say those files are the same size, there is no significant difference in those few bytes, that's just some minor formatting structuring in a slightly different way) could be explained in that there SHOULD BE NO difference; after all, it's just text, why would you expect any difference if you don't have any bitmap graphics or so??

 

And yes, 200KB seems big for 20 pages of text,.... that makes for 10KB per page... each character is one byte, so one page should be less than 1KB..... beats me, no clue there.

You could have a look into the .ps file to see why it is so big; normally a ps file has some formatting info and then the text, almost as is.

 

Are you using a standard font or something special? That could explain something too...

[paleo]

OO1.0 didn't create any ps file. it created 900KB pdf files out of a 22 page openoffice text file... I must be not understanding something in the printing dialog. Print to File should generate a ps file, right? and a 900KB pdf file out of 22pages of text is ridiculous. the text contains about 42,000characters, which means that even with the formatting - there are two fonts used and about two font switches on a page; and there are a few footnotes - the pdf really shouldn't be 200KB, let alone 900KB.

 

The fonts used are ones that I imported from windows with drakfont. I probably ought to RTFM but is there something i need to do to make the fonts available to the pdf engine or something?