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Dori Smith and Tom Negrino's thoughts about technology, politics, and culture since 1999

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Want to make PDFs?

January 24, 2005 by Dori Smith

This question just came up on a mailing list I’m on: you’re on Windows and you want to make PDFs. You have two options:

  • Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional, list price: $449.
  • The Mac mini, list price: $499.

For $50 more, I have to recommend the latter option. Yes, I’m biased.

And I should end this post by pointing to Scott Knaster’s birthday present for the Mac, 21 years old today. Go have a drink in celebration!

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Posted in Uncategorized | 13 Comments

13 Responses

  1. on January 24, 2005 at 4:49 pm Dan Lyke

    Or OpenOffice.org, list price: free.
    But I agree with your overall sentiment.


  2. on January 24, 2005 at 4:55 pm Dori

    OpenOffice for Windows makes PDFs without having to buy any other software? I didn’t know that — thanks!


  3. on January 24, 2005 at 5:17 pm Dan Lyke

    “Export as PDF” under the “File” menu.
    And one thing Apple could do right now that would be easy points and strengthen the platform would be to throw some money the way of the OOo developers for a native Mac version. Now that I have some experience on it, both through me using it and from laying it on some novice users, it’s a very reasonable package, and the fact that the file format is open makes it super handy to integrate into other general workflows. Using Perl to make the spreadsheet an interface for building webpage tables is really handy.
    (And, for reference, the <u> tag doesn’t work on your weblog software; I was trying to be all fancy and denote the hot keys on the menu options.)


  4. on January 24, 2005 at 6:06 pm Matthew Schinckel

    Preview/Print to PDF creates huge PDFs when compared to Acrobat – and you don’t have much flexibility in terms of resolution, etc.
    Fine for when I’m just saving a reciept, but not too good when creating PDFs for a website, for example.


  5. on January 24, 2005 at 6:08 pm Dori

    And one thing Apple could do right now that would be easy points and strengthen the platform would be to throw some money the way of the OOo developers for a native Mac version.
    This was actually my guess for what Apple was going to do with iWork: I thought that they’d take their experience with Safarizing Konqueror and do the same thing to OO. So far, no joy, but I haven’t given up hope yet either.
    Then again, the OO license may not allow Apple to sell a Safarized version, and while giving away Safari makes sense, giving away iWork doesn’t. I’m not any kind of lawyer, much less a licensing expert, but this might be the roadblock.
    (And, for reference, the <u> tag doesn’t work on your weblog software; I was trying to be all fancy and denote the hot keys on the menu options.)
    I have the blog set up to only allow certain tags to be used in comments, and no one’s ever asked for <u> before. Let’s see if it works now.


  6. on January 24, 2005 at 6:14 pm Dori

    Preview/Print to PDF creates huge PDFs when compared to Acrobat – and you don’t have much flexibility in terms of resolution, etc.
    My experience with PDFs is that most people don’t care deeply about how big their PDFs are — they just have some single page that they want to throw up on the Web, or to send out for other people to see in an exact format.
    If you do care, then Acrobat’s the way to go, no question. If you don’t care, and everything you do is just a few pages, and if you’re sending out your files to people with lots of bandwidth (a huge percentage of PDF uses, I’d wager) then OS X’s PDFs are a perfect reasonable choice.


  7. on January 24, 2005 at 7:33 pm Judi Sohn

    While I appreciate what you’re saying, and it’s great that Mac OS X has PDF built-in, it’s unfair to make it sound like Acrobat is the only way to get PDFs in Windows. There are quite a few free PDF converters for Windows by 3rd parties. More than on the Mac platform, that’s for sure. Personally, I prefer Primo PDF on my PC http://www.primopdf.com I wouldn’t use it to make press-ready PDFs, but if I have to make a quick PDF from a file, it works just as well if not better than Mac OS X built-in. The files are certainly much smaller.


  8. on January 24, 2005 at 8:19 pm Dori

    Judi, I have to admit that I don’t know that much about what’s available on Windows, because I’ve never tried to create a PDF on Windows. I’m just going by what was suggested by Windows users on the mailing list.
    I try to avoid all freeware utilities on Windows, personally, because it’s been my experience that they all come with spyware and adware. Yeccch. Not worth it.
    And honestly, (and not just to you, Judi, but to everyone) — when was the last time you saw anyone really care about the size of a PDF? I haven’t seen it in a while. A few bytes more here or there isn’t that big a deal anymore for most of your average uses.
    Look, here’s my most common use for PDF: to generate a single page invoice and send it to one person via email. Even though I generate it through OS X, it’s considerably smaller than the Word doc and graphics that accompany it in the email and are what I’m charging for. And it’s sweet to have it be easily handled by the OS and not having to bother with 3rd party utilities.


  9. on January 24, 2005 at 10:24 pm Tom

    Honey, if you had just asked me: there’s no reason to worry about unreliable Windows freeware. You (well, not you, because we got it for free) can purchase the perfectly wonderful Macromedia FlashPaper 2 for $79 list. It allows you to print any Windows (or Mac) document as a Flash file. But wait, there’s more: on Windows, it allows you to print any document as PDF. Since the Mac has native PDF printing, that feature isn’t part of FlashPaper for Mac. Macromedia sells FlashPaper standalone on Windows; on both Windows and the Mac, it comes bundled with Macromedia Contribute 3.


  10. on January 25, 2005 at 7:33 am Leonard

    Dori – I have to say that I find your “who cares if it is a little bigger” attitude to be one I wouldn’t have expected from you.
    Do you Stuff or Zip files before putting them up for download on your websites?
    Do you spend the time to tweak graphics when optimizing them for your web pages?
    Yes, I suspect you do…
    So why are you treating PDF the same way?!?!? There are excellent tools out there for optimizing PDFs – from Adobe’s own Acrobat Professional, to PDF Enhancer (http://www.pdfenhancer.com) for serious optimization to inexpensive tools such as pdfShrink (http://www.apago.com) for $35!
    Following up on the “freeware” discussion – MANY of the tools for Windows for creating PDFs (including PrimoPDF mentioned above) are supplied by COMMERCIAL vendors who EVEN OFFER SUPPORT and don’t have “spyware or ads”. Why? Because the more PDFs that are created, the more interest their is in their commercial solutions for PDF processing.
    Just like Apple – most people believe that PDF creation should be free. Once you have them, however, the tools for editing/optimization/processing may cost a bit.
    Leonard
    CTO, PDF Sages


  11. on January 25, 2005 at 9:15 am Brian Weaver

    Well I’m a PC user and have been since Windows 1.0. This little comment says volumes about the computer industry and actually makes a tremendous amount of sense.


  12. on January 25, 2005 at 1:33 pm Dori

    Leonard, the answer is simple: I don’t put PDFs up on Web pages. I do create PDFs regularly, but (as I said) primarily to send to editors for invoices. I don’t care how large they are, because they’re always a fraction of the size of the files they’re accompanying.
    And no, I don’t scale or shrink the tiffs I send editors, either — that’s a job for people who have graphics training, and that definitely ain’t me.
    If I was putting PDFs up on the Web, or sending out a PDF-formatted newsletter, or one of any number of other good reasons to use PDFs, then yes, I’d care. But for the purpose I have (and for a lot of other people’s purposes), the size of the file just doesn’t matter.


  13. on January 30, 2005 at 11:11 am Hanan Cohen

    There’s also PDF995 for making PDFs from any program. It’s about 20$.



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