Acrobat ASAP

February 26, 2005 4:10 AM

I need to make real PDFs but I'm far away from civilization and my own computer. I downloaded the "30 day" trial version, and it told me my 30 days were up after a week! Could someone point me to some free?
posted by fucker to technology (11 comments total)

Go download PDF Creator it's completely free and provides you will all the features that you should need.
posted by outofpaper at 4:27 AM on February 26, 2005

You can make pdfs with OpenOffice.
posted by stavrogin at 4:42 AM on February 26, 2005

If you have an MS Windows box, you want this: CutePDF Writer. It's free, and sets up the PDF creator so it looks like a printer to your programs.

Like PDF Creator recommended above by (appropriately) outofpaper, print from any program to the CutePDF "printer", and you get a PDF.

(Requires GhostScript, but conveniently packages it.)
posted by orthogonality at 4:43 AM on February 26, 2005

There are tons of PDF printers out there. I use primoPDF. It's free and it does the job. (PDF Creator and cutePDF can be a bit flaky). As you're away from your PC, may I also suggest using the online PDF Creator from Adobe. You only get 5 goes with the free trial, but there is no need to install potentially dodgy software on somebody elses PC.
posted by seanyboy at 5:08 AM on February 26, 2005

Most important part is the ability to add & delete & replace pages. Do all these programs do that?
posted by fucker at 5:37 AM on February 26, 2005

Before I got InDesign I used to use a PDF Printer program. It would create a new "printer" on your computer that just translated the postscript and graphics into PDF on your HD. Lemme do some Googling...

Ah, here you go, direct from Adobe.
posted by Civil_Disobedient at 5:42 AM on February 26, 2005

Most important part is the ability to add & delete & replace pages. Do all these programs do that?

The programs and applications people are listing allow you to create a PDF from another program. You'll create the document in Word or OpenOffice (or whatever) and then generate a PDF from that document. So all the editing, additions, deletions, etc. would be done before you turn it into a PDF.

If you need to edit/merge existing PDFs, as far as I know you'll need to use Acrobat to do that.
posted by filmgoerjuan at 7:46 AM on February 26, 2005

Since you didn't mention what platform you're using, I'll take the opportunity to plug ps2pdf and dvipdf, seemingly standard on Linux systems. Then before that stage, xfig, latex, ....
posted by Aknaton at 8:51 AM on February 26, 2005

Look on the net for internet sites that take said file, process it on the server, and e-mail it back to you as a PDF. Then you wouldn't have to install any software.
posted by banished at 10:45 AM on February 26, 2005

If you need to edit/merge existing PDFs, as far as I know you'll need to use Acrobat to do that.

To clarify - I already *have* PDF pages and files, I just need to delete pages out of a large number of PDFS and replace them with new pages. Also I have lots of single pages that need to be combined.

If I need Acrobat, and that's the only solution, then would somebody be willing to mail me some files? Or how about tell me how to game Acrobat so I can download their trial version again. I only need it for a couple of days max.
posted by fucker at 7:45 PM on February 26, 2005

To clarify - I already *have* PDF pages and files, I just need to delete pages out of a large number of PDFS and replace them with new pages. Also I have lots of single pages that need to be combined.

So what you need is PDFTK. More specifically, if you are like me, and don't want to use the command line interface, you need PDFTK Builder (the 2MB download has PDFTK packeged with it).

You might need to make some interim files to get what you need, or add the same file multiple times, but print different pages (I use this in order to change the order of pages in a document). Play around with it a bit.

In my experience, PDFTK Builder works like a dream. Also, it's free (GPL).
posted by iceberg273 at 9:36 AM on February 27, 2005