Installing the "Print to PDF" Print Option?

[Reply]

@pdunderhill

Classicaly, you could only save to a PDF file if you bought and paid into the Adobe business. Simple business model, all could read a PDF, few could create.

This is just wrong – as evidenced by the many options in this thread. Adobe’s tools are still among the best for PDF creation, but they’re not the only. Many, many programs, mobile apps and websites can all save to PDF for free, and some subset of them can do various edits from simple to complex.

[zoid]

Bullzip

FREE PDF Printer

[BigT]

I find it strange that no one uses PDFCreator, the open source option.

As for the need to do other stuff in PDF–you don’t use a PDF printer for that. Or, if you do, it’s not all you use. The purpose of a PDF printer is to print the file to PDF. with all the text and graphics. Actually crafting full documents requires a PDF authoring program.

[kanicbird]

CutePDF and many others typically only save something equivalent to a scanned image (unless it changed). Some PDF files perhaps from Adobe saves contain text, not just a image of text, which is copyable and sometimes editable.

[pdunderhill]

Hmm, I did say that the classical way was to buy into the Adobe ecosystem, not so much now agreed but definitely the case in the past.
Peter

[Amateur_Barbarian]

@BigT

As for the need to do other stuff in PDF–you don’t use a PDF printer for that. Or, if you do, it’s not all you use. The purpose of a PDF printer is to print the file to PDF. with all the text and graphics. Actually crafting full documents requires a PDF authoring program.

@kanicbird

CutePDF and many others typically only save something equivalent to a scanned image (unless it changed). Some PDF files perhaps from Adobe saves contain text, not just a image of text, which is copyable and sometimes editable.

I don’t think there’s any such thing as a “PDF authoring program,” except in the sense that you could use a byte editor to create a JPEG - you could use a text editor to write PDF code directly, but I can think of few things more pointless. PDF is almost exclusively an end-output, storage and exchange format, not a native “live” format. That’s precisely what it was designed for. You create a PDF by using any tool capable of producing a printed page and saving, exporting or “printing” to PDF. Tools that can then manipulate the PDF file - crop, move pages around, delete pages, add other PDF files and pages - are not really “authoring” tools any more than a picture gallery is.

PDF is nothing more or less than a streamlined, encapsulated form of PostScript, the printer/graphics language that’s been around since at least 1990 or so. (PDF, PS, EPS and Illustrator AI files are all very similar in format, and Adobe tools and others will open and handle them interchangeably.)

The native format of these files is vector, which means that very complex images and text can be packaged and stored very efficiently. PDFs should be created using this model, which makes them not only smaller but far more flexible - like all vector graphics, they can be printed at whatever resolution the screen or printer can handle.

Far too many apps, and users who misunderstand, use the secondary ability of PDF to hold raster - scanned - images. It’s a good adjunct capability, but it should never be used as the default method of “creating PDFs.” That is, if you’re working from a tool that creates a live document, it is better on ten different levels to “print” it to a true, vector-format PDF than to go through any step that creates a scanned, raster or dot-image version of the file and then embed it in a PDF framework.

PDF is a great way to handle scanned documents… but that’s an entirely secondary and second-rate way to use the format. If you’re using a ‘Print to PDF’ tool that is just creating a raster document image and wrapping it in a PDF framework, you can do much better by switching to one that creates a true, native-format version of the document. For one more thing, more powerful PDF tools can manipulate and even lightly edit the native-format documents, and there’s nothing you can do with the raster-image pages except maybe edit them in Photoshop.

But then, I can and have told stories of even very advanced users who didn’t understand this, and were creating distribution and archive copies of documents - live docs, from Word and other tools - that were in raster+PDF format and thus one-tenth as flexible and ten times the size.

PDF is the gods’ gift to the graphics and publication world. It hurts to see it so misunderstood and misused.

[Bert_Nobbins]

@Richard_Pearse

For Windows I use PDF995.

Seconded. Been using it for years, wholly trouble-free.

[Suburban_Plankton]

@BigT

I find it strange that no one uses PDFCreator, the open source option.

I do

[kanicbird]

@Amateur_Barbarian

… PDF is almost exclusively an end-output, storage and exchange format, not a native “live” format. That’s precisely what it was designed for. You create a PDF by using any tool capable of producing a printed page and saving, exporting or “printing” to PDF. …

Good explanation however it has also been used as a way to fill out, add info to forms, such as submitting a application. You get the PDF with blank spaced to fill in and return.

[Amateur_Barbarian]

@kanicbird

Good explanation however it has also been used as a way to fill out, add info to forms, such as submitting a application. You get the PDF with blank spaced to fill in and return.

PDF has many extensions, forms being one of them. It’s an outstanding bridge between e-forms and paper forms, especially for things like IRS forms.

Annotation, markup, collaborative tools - all other useful extensions, which along with forms need high-level tools (and I’m not sure there are any substitutes for Adobe’s.) I was trying to keep to the average creator-person’s perspective.