I’ve tried some PDF programs online, and they do not work as they should. I was wondering if Wal-Mart or Best Buy would sell PDF creation programs.
If you go into more detail about what you want to do, you might not need to buy anything.
OpenOffice allows you to create PDFs for free.
Exactly. If you just want to turn existing documents into PDFs, something like CutePDF will let you “print” the document into a PDF file. CutePDF sets itself up as an alternate “printer” on your system and converts the document.
If you want to also edit existing PDFs, that’s another matter entirely.
PDF programs are all over the place for free online. I have a number of them installed. The one I use most is Cute PDF Writer. It installs a virtual printer. Any document that has a print function will offer the Cute printer and you can immediately create a flawless PDF document.
However, if you are looking to create documents and manage permissions and so forth, I suggest you buy the version from Adobe. Most people don’t need it.
I edit PDFs by cutting the whole document, pasting it into “Preview” on my Mac, and then saving them as JPEGs. You could save them as PDF’s, too if you wanted.
Most newer programs have a “print to PDF” function. If they don’t, get the one others have mentioned or PrimoPDF works well, too. I used to use that on Windows.
I use FreePDF XP. Works good.
If you drive there in your Model T you might be able to pay cash for a version on floppies. Make sure that you have a current version of DOS installed that has plenty of Extended Memory. You may be able to hook up your modem and find some more info on AOL if your teenager isn’t already using the land line to discuss the latest liner notes on the LP she just bought at the corner record store.
Yeah, you need to go into more detail. Creating PDFs from scratch (i.e. printing a .doc to PDF or using LaTeX markup and a compiler) is much different from altering the content of existing PDFs.
Just for the sake of answering the OP’s question at face value:
Walmart might. Best Buy definitely will, as will Fry’s, Microcenter, etc.
That said, every PDF-related application that I’ve ever seen for sale in a brick-and-mortar store is also a program that you can purchase or try online (legally). So to be honest, I’m not sure what exactly what the OP is hoping to find.
bmasters1, if I may be so bold, I don’t think your problem is that the programs you’ve tried are “online”, but rather that the specific programs you tried were not very good ones – or at least, not very good ones for your purposes. Can you elaborate on:
[ul][li]specifically which programs you’ve tried[/li][li]what it is about those programs that you found unsatisfactory[/li]what sort of “PDF program” you’re looking for: viewing, editing, and creating PDFs (by which I assume you mean producing a PDF document from some other document format) are more or less treated as separate arenas. Applications that can edit PDF documents will usually do all three, but otherwise most applications will only do one of the above.[/ul]
WordPerfect, a word processing program that has been around since before Microsoft Word, allows you to read, edit, and create .pdfs.
Caveat: the free readers (like Adobe) work much better for reading.
The editing is basically some sort of OCR thing, so anything other than plain text loses most formatting.
The production of .pdfs, on the other hand, is brilliant. I’ve been using the feature for many years, and they are beautiful. One or two features don’t work right (yellow-highlighted text doesn’t appear highlighted in the .pdf) but basically it’s great. Plus, it’s a great word processing program, better in many ways except for the fatal flaw of lacking unicode support.
You can also create PDFs from Microsoft Office, starting with the 2007 version.
Copycats. (Good to know, though.)
Yes, what exactly is the OP trying to do?
Many document-creation programs allow you to save a document as a PDF. OpenOffice, Microsoft Office, NeoOffice, Apple Pages, text editors, all sorts…
Many operating systems allow you to print an existing document to PDF. People have mentioned the Windows PDF-creation programs that set themselves up as printers. On Mac OS X, this is built into the OS. Even some copiers and scanners will make PDFs.
PDFs come in two broad groups: ones that contain embedded images, and ones that contain only text.
If you scan something into a PDF, the PDF will just contain an image, even though you might have scanned a page of text. You will need to OCR the image to create editable text from it. The Adobe Acrobat PDF-creation software (not Adobe Reader!) can do this. You then have to go through the text and correct the typos… because no optical character-recognition system is perfect.
Now, editing an existing PDF is a completely-different basket of fish.
I used Acrobat to do this, and many PDFs broke when I attempted to change them, even doing small things like changing a page number. This seemed to be related to the internal layout of the PDF and whether all characters of the fonts were included in the PDF.
(Many Adobe tools seem to turn font subsetting on by default, supplying only the characters that are actually used in the document. This led to problems if you wanted to edit the PDF later and add some text that used a new character, for example in a title font where only a few characters had been used in total. There seemed to be no way to turn off this default setting; I had change the setting to say, “use 100% of all fonts” every time. Really annoying.)
This looks more like a method for making PDFs uneditable.
PDFs are tricky beasts. The conference I’m involved with is associated with IEEE, and they have PDF requirements for papers, enforced by an online checking tool. A few years ago PDFs created by StarOffice (the old OO) always failed. Fortunately they also provided a .doc to pdf conversion tool which made the checker happy.
I have Acrobat also for this conference, and it is very handy in splitting and combining pdfs. I haven’t used most of the editing features. However writing PDFs in OO or Word usually works just fine.
BTW, newer versions of OO read PDFs and allow you to edit them, but don’t expect this to work well on anything very complicated.
Acrobat Pro is definitely the gold standard of PDF editing and creation, and I’d be surprised if most technology stores don’t carry it. It is available for download as well.
But it is also overkill for many uses.