Freeware PDF creators ?

[DanB]

Can anyone point me in the right direction of a decent freeware PDF creation tool ? I'm trying to help our local Primary School create their newsletter in PDF, but they insist on using full size megapixel photographs which means that the original Word document is always massive (most recently 30+ mb !). The freeware PDF creators they've been using hardly reduce the size at all. I installed the Acrobat7 demo for a month, and that was great - it really brough the filesize down. However, that's now run out and the price is so high it's unaffordable on their budget.

So, are there any freeware PDF creators that manage a decent job of compressing things ? They don't need any other functionality beyond the basic conversion (another reason not to invest in Acrobat).

Thanks,

Dan

 

[Otacon]

CutePDF Writer.

 

[Gooner14]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

 

[DanB]

But are either of these good at reducing filesizes ?

 

[Blackstar_solar]

http://www.pdf995.com/

 

[derfderfley]

http://www.openoffice.org/ native PDF export

 

[DanB]

But that's not much help if the office staff are creating Word documents which they want to convert ?

 

[M0KUJ1N]

Cute PDF Writer- seconded, esp as file size seems to be a concern

As cute-pdf uses ghostscript to do "the hard work" you can issue custom commands to control dpi etc, more details available at: http://www.cutepdf.com/support/faq.asp

and

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/gnu/7.05/Ps2pdf.htm

hope this helps

 

[TriedandTested]

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

Yes yes. Second that.

 

[SourChipmunk]

http://www.pdf995.com/

All the ideas listed except for this one convert the file to a bmp. Therefore text loses quality and the file sizes are huge. pdf995 uses a print driver, so it is the closest thing to a true PDF you can get. Check this thread out.

 

[Snow-Munki]

broadgun pdf writer here, use it on most of our work machines.

even has an integrated office app and many users don't understant why they need to 'print' to pdf !

 

[M0KUJ1N]

All the ideas listed except for this one convert the file to a bmp. Therefore text loses quality and the file sizes are huge.

Can you qualify this statement? I just converted a ~25MB word document with cutepdf and the size of the output file was about 1.5MB. This file wasn't quite representative of a newsletter though, as it is a training document of 50 odd pages with several images through it, rather than one page with several large images on it.

pdf995 uses a print driver, so it is the closest thing to a true PDF you can get. Check this thread out.

Are you a sales rep for pdf995 by any chance?

 

[SourChipmunk]

Are you a sales rep for pdf995 by any chance?

Heh heh. Nope. I just spent several days trying to create a PDF of a newsletter that I could share with quite a few illiterate people. Some of it had 8 pt text (disclaimer stuff) that was not legible at all using the other tools. pdf995 did the job perfectly, and it scales perfectly in Acrobat Reader and prints and does everything a true PDF would. I'm just going by experience. Perhaps I just wasn't using the other tools properly.

 

[derfderfley]

But that's not much help if the office staff are creating Word documents which they want to convert ?

Apart from the fact that it will open/edit/convert/print word documents ?

 

[TriedandTested]

All the ideas listed except for this one convert the file to a bmp. Therefore text loses quality and the file sizes are huge. pdf995 uses a print driver, so it is the closest thing to a true PDF you can get. Check this thread out.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

uses a print driver too and gives excellent results.