How to create PDF documents (for example from MS Word)?

Table of contents

Introduction
Mac OS X
Linux
MS Windows
- CutePDF
- PrimoPDF and others
At the University of Southampton
If this page doesn't help...

Introduction

The basic idea is that instead of printing the document and sending it to a printer, one prints the document into a pdf file.

Mac OS X

On Mac OS X, this functionality is provided by the operating system: on the print screen, click on the button in the lower left corner which is labelled PDF, then select Save as PDF.

Linux

Applications may offer to write directly to PDF. If not, then you can save a PostScript (PS) file, and convert this to pdf from the command line (using ps2pdf MYFILE.ps).

MS Windows

On Windows, a third party tool needs to be used to be able to print into pdf files. The commercial Adobe Write is well known. We mention a free tool (at least the required functionality is free which is called CutePDF):

CutePDF

Home page: http://www.cutepdf.com/
Download http://www.cutepdf.com/download/CuteWriter.exe, and
start installation by double clicking.
When asked, confirm that you would like CutePDF Writer Setup to download a PS2PDF converter tool from the Internet (click Yes). This will download and install a program called GhostScript automatically.
CutePDF will bring up its documentation (which you can find on your machine in file:///C:/Program Files/Acro Software/CutePDF Writer/README.HTM) and which reads:

Using CutePDF Writer to create PDF document:

DO NOT look for any application to run. Just print your document using CutePDF Writer (the printer) to get PDF output.
1. Open your original document and select Print command in File menu of your application to bring up Print dialog box.
2. Then select CutePDF Writer as the Printer to print (DO NOT select "Print to file" option).
3. You will get a Save As dialog box prompted for saving created PDF file. Select a folder to Save in and enter a File name, then click on Save.
4. Go to that folder to find your PDF file.

That's it.

So, to re-cap: to print a MS Word document, you open the document, start as you would to print the document, then select the CutePDF Write as the printer to use, and click OK. After a short time, you will have to decide where to save the pdf file. You can check the pdf file by double clicking on it, or open it with Acrobat Reader or any other tools.

PrimoPDF and others

Note that there are more tools out there that provide similar functionality to CutePDF. There is no particular reason for describing CutePDF here apart from that this was the first tool we have tried, and everything worked out of the box as described above.

Other such tools include

PrimoPDF (http://www.primopdf.com)
Specialist software for MS Office 2007: A student recommended this tool for Office 2007. Apparently, this achieves much better compression than PrimoPDF or CutePDF (i.e. the resulting pdf files are smaller).

At the University of Southampton

According to Graham Robinson from the Serviceline (as of 6 January 2010), the instructions above can be used to create pdfs on iSolutions workstations, with the following changes:

Student workstations will either
1. Have Adobe Acrobat installed (Creating PDFs through Adobe Acrobat is exactly the same as Cute PDF except instead of selecting "CutePDF Writer" you select "Adobe PDF" as the printer)
2. If Adobe Acrobat is not installed Cute PDF should already be installed (use as instructed above)
For 1. and 2. no installation of software is necessary.
1. In some situations neither Adobe Acrobat nor Cute PDF will be installed and students will have to also install the Cute PDF software through the "additional software" icon on student workstations.
Staff workstations:

Staff need to install Cute PDF through the "additional software" icon on their Desktop.

If this page doesn't help...

then contact the serviceline on serviceline@soton.ac.uk or phone extension -25656 (02380595656 from outside the university). Please also inform Hans Fangohr about the problems and advise you receive from the serviceline, so that this page can be updated.

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