Bill Kearney

Making PDF?

If anyone out there wants to make PDF files without using Acrobat then here's what it takes. Go get

• GhostScript
• RedMon
• the generic Adobe generic printer driver
• along with the Distiller profiles
• and PDF-tool

Redmon sets up a virtual port so your programs will know where to send the data. The Adobe generic printer driver send to that port. Redmon then redirects the data to PDF-tool. PDF-tool then calls GhostScript to create the pages. They're imaged, returned to PDF-tool and then you can either save to disk or e-mail them.

It wasn't trivial to set up but not impossibly hard. Grasping what's being done and why is probably the hard part. The layering of different tools here is needed and important that it's configured just right.

Note that the FTP server for ghostview and some of it's tools seems to be acting up lately. I used the Sunsite mirror in Switzerland to get my copies of RedMon, GhostScript and GhostView.

Download everything first. You'll need something like 30mb of free space to hold everything for the installation. When running it's less but who cares about disk space anymore?

Install GhostScript. Install PDF-tool. Install RedMon. Unzip the Adobe profiles for Distiller. Then run the Adobe generic printer installer. Select the Redmon created port (I called my RPT1:). Browse to the unzipped Distiller PPDs when selecting a printer. Do not do a test print and you probably don't want this as your default printer. Then go run run PDF-tool and configure it.

Then it's just a matter of printing to it. After you print from the program the PDF-tool program will pop up and ask how you want to handle the PDF. You can either save it or send it as mail.

At some point I may try to set up one my linux boxes to act as a PDF server. This would let me share the setup among different machines. The act of saving a PDF file from the driver means it has to run as a user and wants filename input. Using the linux box dumps the output into timestamped filenames that would have to be on a shared network drive. It's sort of 6 of one vs a half dozen of the other. I can live with wasting resources by putting the software on the Windows boxes individually and it makes better sense on the laptop anyway.

The end result is I can now create PDF files for publishing complex images to the web. I try to use HTML whenever possible and will use SVG when it matures but meanwhile PDF does a nice job.