Anyone got info on how to convert various documents to PDF format?

Thx
Derrick

You can visit

www.adobe.com

all the information is available there. You can even find an opportunity to convert up to five documents to pdf online.

Etarhan

I want to write an application or download a freeware program that can convert many different formats to pdf (and possibly back again!).

Am not interested in http sites that you send the document to and get the conversion returned.

Derrick

I have found that converting files to .pdf format very useful. For example, I can send CAD diagrams to clients who may not have access to a CAD program.

I searched for free conversion utilities online and found only shareware which placed a huge "Demo" banner across the output (see www.tucows.com). Fortunately, my wife is a graphic artist and had the full Adobe program. Good thing too, the program is quite expensive.

Women can be surprisingly useful at times

Purchase Acrobat writer for about $250.
With that your MS-Office documents, Word, Excel, Powerpoint among others can be created with one click to PDF format.
Also all the points related to security, search capability, launching other programs from your PDF document are taken to the limit. And you are not bound to an specific operating system.

Steven van Els
SAvanEls@cq-link.sr

One note on using the full, paid version of Acrobat--it should be installed after the other applications.  In most cases, it will be anyway.

Another tool I have found useful is a non-Adobe program that will distill PostScript documents to PDF.  This particular one is called PStill, and can be found at www.pstill.com .  You can download a free version, but the paid version is not expensive.  It has both a gui and non-user-interacting version that can be called programmatically.  You can't do this with the regular Acrobat distiller, as it will want to come up within a logged-on user and get some interaction.  

Obviously you are not going to get better than Adobe Acrobat, but here are a few suggestion. I have tried these out at one time or another.
 
Free online convertor (useful for one-offs)
http://www.gohtm.com/
http://www.ps2pdf.com/convert/convert.htm

AFPL Version is free for non-commercial use
http://www.ghostscript.com/

Excellent value @ $19.99 and installs as a printer http://www.software602.com/products/printpack/
but you can't edit the documents however...

this editor is very cheap compared to Adobe and is very good
http://www.jawspdf.com/


Chris.

try the download at www.pdf995.com

free but it pops up windows

after it is installed, it is just like a printer  

Ben Loosli
CAD/CAM System Analyst
Ingersoll-Rand

There is an application called win2pdf available by download at www.downloads.com.  The application works by "printing" to a pdf.  I haven't tested it's capabilities extensively, but it works great with Office documents.

As for me, I uses Mac OS X. Hence I can convert any printable document from any application to PDF format out of the box without additional installation.

mus%

Unfortunately, at the end of the day, you still have a Mac.  

As already stated get yourself a copy of Ghostscript (its free) and then get a copy of Ghostgum, this give you a nice GUI interface and is also free. I use this all the time and once you get the settings right it is almost as good as the Adobe product