PDFalerts

The ASUS Eee PC comes with either Xandros or Windows XP installed by default. Since there is a ton of different ways to create PDFs on Windows XP (just search Google for ‘create pdfs free xp’), this post will just focus on creating PDFs on Xandros.

In this tutorial we are going to use CUPS-PDF to add print to PDF functionality in Xandros on the Eee PC in Easy Mode.

Creating PDFs on the Eee PC (Easy Mode)

1. The first thing you’ll need to do is open the Terminal Window. You can do this by pressing Ctrl, Alt and T at the same time or by clicking on the Work tab, starting the File Manager, clicking on the Tools menu and then clicking on Open Console Window.
2. Now type in the following line and press Enter:

sudo apt-get install cups-pdf

Note: depending on the state of Xandros on you machine you may need to add another repository directly to the sources.list file. To do that, type the following command into the terminal window:

sudo nano /etc/apt/sources.list

Then add this line to the end of the sources.list file:

deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian stable main

Then save your changes by pressing Ctrl and O, then pressing Enter and then pressing Ctrl and X to close the sources.list file and return to the normal terminal window.

If you run into further trouble, try updating your local repository with Debian’s sources and then repeat step 2. You can sync the repositories by running:

apt-get update

3. CUPS-PDF is now installed, but it won’t show up in your list of available printers until you have configured it. To configure CUPS-PDF follow these steps:

a) Open Firefox and type http://localhost:631/ into the location bar and hit Enter.

b) Select Add Printer from the web interface for CUPS-PDF.

c) Add New Printer: Enter in a Name, Location and Description for your virtual PDF printer. You can enter anything here, it’s purely for your benefit. For simplicities sake I gave my virtual PDF printer the name ‘cups-pdf’ and didn’t bother with location or description, as I’m the only one using it. Click Continue.

d) Device for cups-pdf: Select Virtual Printer (PDF Printer) from the drop-down list. Click Continue.

e) Make/Manufacturer for cups-pdf: Select Postscript from the drop-down list. Click Continue.

f) Model/Driver for cups-pdf: You’ll only have one option (on my machine it’s Generic postscript color printer rev4 (en)) to select, so select it and then click Add Printer.

Note: in the final step in the configuration after you click on “Add Printer” you may get a pop-up Authorization Request window asking you for a username and password for “CUPS” at http://localhost:631/. Try entering “root” as your username and then your machines password to get passed this authorization request. That worked for me.

And that’s it, you should now have the ability to create PDFs on your Eee PC.

A final tip: when you create your first PDF using CUPS-PDF a folder called PDF is automatically created in the My Home directory. Whenever you create a PDF using CUPS-PDF it will be placed in here. You can navigate to this folder by clicking on the Work tab, then clicking on File Manager and then looking for the PDF folder under My Home.

Microsoft have announced that Office 2007 Service Pack 2 (SP2) will include native support for PDF.

With the release of SP2 users will be able to save documents directly to PDF from within Office applications, without having to install any additional add-ons. This marks a return to Microsoft’s original plan for PDF support.

When planning for Office 2007 Microsoft initially planned to include ‘Save as PDF’ support natively, but after a dispute with Adobe, they relented and instead offered ‘Save as PDF’ support through an optional add-on, which is available for free download.

Since PDF came under the control of a standards body in 2007, Adobe are unable to prevent Microsoft from including native support for PDF in Office 2007.

Microsoft also plan to include native support for ‘Save as XPS’ and support for ODF documents.

We’ve previously covered Loop for Firefox which allows you to “Upload, convert and combine your files to PDF from a tidy toolbar, without the conversion getting in the way of your Web browsing”.

But if you’re just looking for a Firefox add-on that helps you convert web pages to PDF then you should check out PrintPDF.

Currently this Firefox add-on only supports Firefox 3 and doesn’t create hyperlinks in the PDF files.

Once you have installed PrintPDF simply go to File > Print to PDF to convert the web page you are currently viewing to PDF. Your default printer options are used when formatting the page for PDF generation.

Download the PrintPDF Firefox add-on from here.

I’ve just finished upgrading to Gutsy Gibbon, the latest release of Ubuntu, and I am very happy to find that a PDF printer driver is now installed by default. Previously I’ve covered some PDF creators that are available for Linux operating systems and have generally found that they are lacking in both functionality and numbers (i.e. there isn’t that many of them). Hopefully now that the PDF printer is a more integrated part of Ubuntu, it will get more attention feature wise.

The PDF printer in Gutsy Gibbon is an updated version of CUPS-PDF.

It’s easy enough to create PDFs on a Windows or Mac machine, but what about Linux? A quick search of the web will show you that Linux doesn’t have half the number of PDF creator options that Windows and Macs have, not even close, in fact your options on Linux are quite limited (which is hard for me to say, since I’m a Linux fan).

You might be asking why would anyone need more than one PDF creator? The answer is simple, if there was one free PDF creator that did everything (retain links, bookmarks, indexes, tables of contents, convert entire websites, optimize output, control font embedding, add metadata, etc), then you wouldn’t need more than one, but there isn’t, so you need options.

Here are some of the options for creating PDFs on Linux:

• CUPS-PDF: This is perhaps the most well known PDF printer driver for Linux. If you are using Ubuntu then CUPS-PDF is provided as part of the distribution, you can install it by following these instructions. My main complaint is that you cannot manually specify the location that you would like to save your printed PDF to, instead the application prints all PDFs to a hard coded location (in Ubuntu it is a folder called PDF in the home directory). Also, you can only configure the PDFs paper size, color and margin, you are unable to configure settings like the desired file size/quality, etc.
• OpenOffice: With the release of version 1.1 Open Office included a export to PDF option. While this isn’t a stand alone PDF creation tool, OpenOffice does allow you to open and print it’s native files as well as Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint documents and some image formats.
• ps2pdf: If you are comfortable working with the command line then you might like to check out this option. ps2pdf uses Ghostscript to convert postscript files to PDF. Most Linux operating systems support the creation of postscript files natively.

As you can see, the number of Linux PDF creators is quite limited at the moment, but last year at the Linux Desktop Printing Summit, it was agreed that PDF would replace PostScript as the standard print job transfer and processing format for Linux, so hopefully this will mean a number of high quality PDF printer drivers become available for Linux in the not-to-distant future. Read more here.
Don’t forget, if you don’t want to install any applications on your machine, you can use one of these free online PDF converters to create your PDF documents, they are completely platform-independent.

Lastly, it’s important to note that a number of applications, such as OpenOffice and Scribus, support exporting to PDF natively, so if you only need to create PDFs from certain applications, you may not need a stand alone PDF creator.

P.S. If I have missed any PDF printer drivers for the Linux platform then please add a comment and I will update the post. Specifically I’m looking for PDF printer drivers similar to Primo PDF or PDF Creator. Cheers.

• If you are interested in the technical side of PDF [and related technologies] then check out James King’s new blog called Inside PDF. He is the PDF Architect and a Senior Principal Scientist at Adobe — so you are definitely getting the inside word.
• PC Magazine has praised the PDF format and provided readers with reviews of four different PDF creators — Adobe Acrobat, BullZip PDF Printer, deskPDF Professional and PDF Converter Professional 4. It’s definitely not a comprehensive list (or even close) of all the PDF creators out there, so check out the comments section of the article because other readers have suggested some additional PDF creators.
• If you are lucky enough to already have an iPhone, and need to create some PDFs, then check out this new application called iPDF. It is a simple online text editor for creating and distributing PDFs.

A few interesting links that I’ve come across today:

• Rick Borstein on his Acrobat for Legal Professionals blog has attacked PDF clones as being cheap and inferior imitations of Adobe Acrobat. He obviously knows which side his bread is buttered on.
• Want to convert PDFs to Word, Excel or JPEG? Computer Tips From A Customer Guy has some.. err.. tips.
• Germany company UNIVERSE GmbH have released pdf-Office Professional in Version 7.0.

Word processor documents are for authoring, PDF documents are for sharing. It’s a fairly simple concept, to which even the developers of these Word Processors have cottoned on to. Yet there are still users who insist on sharing their Word processor documents with colleagues, colleagues who do not need to make changes to the document and are only reviewing them, in this authoring format, instead of converting these document into a file sharing format, like PDF.

Is there really any excuse for this given that most decent Word Processors include support for export to PDF? Here is three well known Word Processors that support this much valued functionality.

• Microsoft Office 2007. Microsoft could not deny their customers this functionality any longer, for the latest version of , you can download a Save as PDF plug-in here.
• OpenOffice.org 2. The latest versions of OpenOffice come with Publish to PDF functionality built in. Plus the whole application is free.
• Google Docs & Spreadsheets.Never one to miss a beat Google know what users want and have included a Export to PDF function in their online and free, Word Processor.

The number of different ways to create PDFs is growing daily. A few years ago if you didn’t have Acrobat, your options for creating PDFs were quite limited, but today there are hundreds, if not thousands, of free and commercial PDF conversion utilities out there that will allow you to create all the PDFs that you could possibly desire. In this post I will list a number of different free online PDF converters.

• PrimoPDF Online - Simply browse to the file to be converted on your machine and upload it for immediate conversion to PDF. Once converted, the resultant PDF file is made available via email.
• LOOP for Firefox - Upload, convert and combine your files to PDF from a tidy toolbar, without the conversion getting in the way of your Web browsing. LOOP for Firefox allows you to convert and combine files to PDF with the click of a button.
• PDF Online - Convert Microsoft Word documents to PDF, Excel XLS to PDF, Powerpoint PPT to PDF, Text TXT to PDF, HTML to PDF, most image formats (JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, etc) to PDF, and much more.
• ExpressPDF - Convert your Microsoft Word and Excel documents and Web pages to PDF.
• Media Convert - Create PDFs from pretty much any file format and convert PDFs to Text Files (.txt), Rich Text Format/MS Word (.rtf), Adobe Postscript (.ps) and Flash SWF (.swf).
• RSS 2 PDF - Convert your RSS feeds into PDFs.

As you can see, there are a number of ways that you can create PDFs online for free. My personal favourite is the LOOP for Firefox that I’ve previous mentioned here, but all of these online services performed pretty well in general and I am sure that one of the services will be to your liking.

The add-ons for Firefox just keep getting better. This new one from Drawloop Technologies allows you to create and combine multiple PDFs directly inside your Firefox browser. You have the option of converting files from your desktop or converting the web page that you are currently viewing or a combination of both.

This is a great tool for anyone who doesn’t already have a PDF creator and only occasionally needs to create hassle and cost free, PDFs.

Check it out: LOOP for Firefox.

I look forward to the next great Firefox add-on.