PDF-ing your documents
Tagged: cutepdf, free, macs, os x, pdf, pdfs, prayer letters, printers, web standards, windows.
Category: Uncategorized
We’re all familiar with PDFs, those documents that you get that you can always read but you can never edit. They have been pretty standard for a number of years now (they’ve existed since 1993), but they’re on the brink of becoming the standard for documents on the internet (there are actual standards for content on the Web).
They are convenient because you don’t have to worry about whether or not your friend has Word, Publisher or whatever other program you’ve created your document in – they can still read it. It’s also great for sending out prayer letters by email so that you’re sure that all of your supporters can read it – I mean the program to read them is even free!
For a long time I was confused about how many people seemed to be able to create PDFs yet I was completely not able to make them… then I found out how.
Now, from what I understand, the ability to save a document to a PDF is native to OS X so those of you who are Mac users have this pretty easy. We’re going to walk through how to install a PDF Converter as a printer on your system. The program that I use is CutePDF.
CutePDF allows you to create a PDF document in any program that you can print from. When I need to print off a Bible study to send to a student – “print” it as a PDF and email it. When I have a receipt online that I want to save – “print” it as PDF and save it on my hard drive. When I want to save a webpage complete with all of the content as a single file – “print” it as a PDF and I can open it quickly whenever I want.
First, go ahead and download it from here (Windows required), you’ll also need to download a converter called Ghostscript that is also linked on the page (you can get it here). On the CutePDF page they’ll look like this image to the left.
Now all you have to do is run the CuteWriter.exe and converter.exe files that you’ve just downloaded and you’ll have CutePDF installed in your options whenever you want to print something. When you “print” with it, it will give you an opportunity to save it as a PDF where ever you want.
Now you can create PDFs!
April 24th, 2008 15:04
Hey isn’t Jason cool… A little note about .pdf documents. The new version of Microsoft Office (2007) has a free download plug in that will let you save to .pdf in one step. Here is a link to the download. http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=4d951911-3e7e-4ae6-b059-a2e79ed87041&DisplayLang=en
You may need to copy the link and past it into your browser. I have loved Ghost script and used it for some time now, but I made the move to this office plug-in because it is easier and does a better job of shrinking the file size with pictures and such. I’m guessing the this feature will be part of the mac version of office as well.
If you don’t have the newest version of office this will not work though. Hey with our huge discount (only around $80 for the whole office suite) why not upgrade. Unless your computer is old and will not run it.
April 24th, 2008 18:46
Thanks for the update and the additional info, Dave. I’ll mention this in a post this next week. I figure it’s still good to have the Ghost script writer around for creating PDFs from other programs (Firefox, etc.).