I’m a real cheapskate when it comes to buying software. I’ve found that for almost any commercial software, there’s freeware that does the same thing. One I haven’t found yet is something that creates pdf-type documents. It doesn’t have to be a common format; it’s going to be used to assemble old (self-made) comics onto my computer once they’ve been scanned. They’re unlikely to released so compatibility with other people’s computers isn’t an issue. Simplicity would be a plus. Does anybody know of such a program?
It is basically a printer driver that prints to a pdf file. You can create your program with any program you like. As long as it can print, this gives you a pdf document.
Here’s another PDF creation package (freeware) that operates as a printer driver: http://www.pdf995.com/. If you can print it, you can make a PDF file from it.
I agree about PDF995. Just the thing if you need to make a few PDF files but don’t want to pay for Acrobat. It’s actually using Adobe technology – it’s an version of Acrobat that Adobe is no longer making.
You have to see an ad every time you make a file, but that’s a small price to pay.
I used PDF Creator once, and it worked quite well for me. I wanted to save a soft copy of my tax return, but in a standard doc format readable by anything else.
First, I printed to a .ps postscript file. It was 400 megabytes!
Then I used PDF Creator, and it made pdf file that was like 40k (and yes, it was perfectly readable).
The old traditional one was GhostScript, which has a “PS2PDF” command. You would print to a raw postscript file, using a printer driver for any PostScript printer and selecting “print to file”; then you’d crank up GhostScript to convert it to PDF. Freeware, ported from Unix.
PDFCreator is probably easier.
On other platforms: MacOS 9 users tend to flock to Print2PDF by the same person who wrote the famous Print2Pict driver. (Dave Warker, possibly?). I think that one’s shareware. As with the Windows platform, Mac users can also obtain GhostScript and print using the LaserWriter driver and saving as a raw PostScript file & converting with GhostScript for free.
Under MacOS X, printing to PDF is built-in to the OS.
I’m not a big fan of PDF995, as it’s ad-supported and hijacks your web browser to display ads. Of course, they tell you it’s gonna do that when you download the software, but I would have preferred that it use it’s own ad window or something instead of using an IE window that I already have open. Plus, I’ve used PDF995 on two machines and it seems to sto pworking after 4-5 documents and needs to be reinstalled.
PDFCreator works much better and doesn’t have any ads.
I use Zeon Docucom, available from http://www.zeon.com.tw, and am quite satisfied with it. It’s similare to pdf995, in that it installs as a printer driver, and then any program that has a print function can produce a pdf file.
It’s not freeware, but the price is reasonable ($49, as I remember). There is a free trial version available for downloading.
Unsurprising. The Portable Document Format is a subset of PostScript and is always presented to the end user as a compressed text file (as opposed to PostScript, which is usually uncompressed ASCII).
How deeply? Is it in the Darwin kernel or is it in some ancillary library? (I hope it isn’t in the kernel itself: Microsoft provides an object lesson in why keeping kernel space small and limited to essential OS tasks is a very good idea, performance be damned.)
(I ask because the ancestral NeXT machines used PostScript as a screen definition language.)
[QUOTE=Derleth (I hope it isn’t in the kernel itself: Microsoft provides an object lesson in why keeping kernel space small and limited to essential OS tasks is a very good idea, performance be damned.)[/QUOTE]
Certainly true. But it was known by many others, long before Microsoft even existed.
For example, Fred Brooks, designer of the OS/360 operating system for Mainframes (introduced in 1964) mentions in his 1975 book “The Mythical Man-Month” that it was a mistake to include in the kernal code to automatically handle year-end changeovers during leap years. It uses up 26 bytes of resident code, which he considers an excessive waste!
I’m almost positive it’s the “Aqua” screen-display layer — Aqua is itself based on PDF, which (as you know) is a variation on PostScript, as is Display PostScript which (as you said) was used in NeXT. I don’t know the details of why they switched from Display PostScript to PDF, might’ve been greater convenience and compatibility or might have been something to do with licensing. I doubt that “printing to PDF” is built into the kernel. You can probably print to PDF from a command-line app, but you’d need to go at it the hard way (referencing other command-line utilities that let you print to PostScript and then using GhostScript to convert to PDF or something like that).
t-bonham@scc.net, you have completely misconstrued me. Microsoft has placed parts of its IIS server in kernel space for efficiency reasons, even though it gives Nimda and other cracks kernel-level permissions when they get through the security. Apache, on the other hand, runs in userland (and rather unprivileged at that), so Apache cracks get you, at most, a small user account.
BTW, I have a copy of The Mythical Man-Month. Can you give me the section and/or page that comment appears?
AHunter3: Interesting indeed. I suspected it was a connection to NeXT one way or another.
Well, I didn’t intend to construe you any way. Actually, I think we agree on this.
No, sorry, I read it years ago, and don’t have a copy on hand to find the page.
It was in a part where Fred looked back on decisions made during the OS/360 design, and discussed which loked right or wrong based on years of experience. I think this was a foreword, and may have been an addition to later editions of the book, possibly starting with the 20th Anniversary edition (circa mid-1990’s). If your copy is earlier than that, it may not be there at all. Search the web and you will find parts of it quoted, but I don’t know of anywhere that has the complete text online.