pdf generator

[Bill Campbell]

On Fri, Oct 08, 2004, Fairlight wrote:
>With neither thought nor caution, Patowic blurted:
>> Is there a PDF generator available for filepro?  I'm running into 
>> limitations with my various printers, in terms of things like font 
>> sizing and what not.  Being able to create a PDF would allow me to then 
>> use either cups to generate hard copies, or to email the PDF to an user 
>> directly.
>
>Well, I'm not sure what you're starting with.  If it's plain ASCII, you
>could do something like print -> a2ps -> ps2pdf and end up with a PDF.
>
>Mind you, I just know the programs exist.  Last time I tried pdf2ps it
>bailed on my document, and both conversion programs are part of
>ghostscript.  a2ps appears to be a separate package.
>
>I'm sure other, more printer-oriented folks will chime in, but here's one
>possibility to think about.  (I have no need of paper and printing myself,
>so I'm not very printer-oriented, pardon the pun.)

On *nix systems ghostscript handles this quite nicely.  I think that CUPS
has provisions to create PDF files as well, but I haven't looked into it in
detail.  I often use the convert utility from ImageMagick to convert
PostScript(tm) to PDF:

	convert filename.ps filename.pdf

On a slightly related note, I've found that acroread on SuSE 9.0 seems to
generate PostScript that won't print through CUPS, and that using ``xpdf''
program works fine.

Bill
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