Creating PDF's

Author
Discussion

rospa

Original Poster:

494 posts

255 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
quotequote all
Hi

Is it possible to have a process that runs under Windows that simply scans a certain folder for input files and then creates a .PDF from it.

Something like:

PDFCREATE JUNK.DOC JUNK.PDF

Does Adobe offer this type of "off-line" PDF creater?

Thanks in advance for any help.

Podie

46,645 posts

282 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
quotequote all
Options;

a) Adobe Writer
b) Adobe Writer on-line service

Not aware of any command line jobbie...

PetrolTed

34,443 posts

310 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
quotequote all
You may be able to use PDF995. That behaves like a printer driver so in theory you could run a print command from the command line with that device as the output device.

Podie

46,645 posts

282 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
quotequote all
PetrolTed said:
You may be able to use PDF995. That behaves like a printer driver so in theory you could run a print command from the command line with that device as the output device.


ooh.. sounds useful. Got any more details?

lake

486 posts

271 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
quotequote all
PetrolTed said:
You may be able to use PDF995. That behaves like a printer driver so in theory you could run a print command from the command line with that device as the output device.


Another one of these is fineprint pdf factory www.fineprint.com/

Lake

PetrolTed

34,443 posts

310 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
quotequote all

lake

486 posts

271 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
quotequote all
PetrolTed said:
www.pdf995.com/


Ted,

This one looks better than the finrprint version I memtioned as fineprint puts a watermark at the bottom of every page on the free version.

Lake

Podie

46,645 posts

282 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
quotequote all
PetrolTed said:
www.pdf995.com/


Ta.

sjg

7,535 posts

272 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
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I use PDFCreator - http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/ which works very well and is completely free (unlike pdf995 which annoys you with ads unless you pay).

If you have the full version of Acrobat, it comes with Distiller, which can take postscript files and turn them into PDFs. It can be set up to monitor a folder and process any .PS files dropped into it. Not sure how the licencing works if you're doing this for multiple users though. You can create the .PS files by adding a local printer, use a postscript driver for any colour laser and do "print to file".

There are commercial PDF servers I've seen which can just be fed word docs and spit out PDFs, but they've always been very pricey. A friend also set up rather a neat system on linux - used samba to pretend it was a windows server, had a "shared printer" which actually just fed the data into ghostscript and then put the PDFs somewhere else. As you can batch-print word docs, it was a pretty quick way of doing lots of them.

tim_s

299 posts

261 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
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i use htmldoc (command line app) to convert html to pdf - dunno if that helps.

grahambell

2,718 posts

282 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
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I've got Jaws pdf creator (older version, came free with computer mag CD) which is dead easy to use and seems to work well - unlike some others I've tried (gymnast and easypdf). Haven't got the web address handy but a quick search should soon locate it if you want to check it out.

Have created pdf files from both Word and Publisher files with it, but think it also works with other programmes.

Not sure how much the latest version is to buy, but it'll be a hell of a lot less than Adobe.

rospa

Original Poster:

494 posts

255 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
quotequote all
Thanks, folks, for the pointers. Better get cracking!

Cheers

FunkyGibbon

3,795 posts

271 months

Thursday 18th September 2003
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we use AdLib eXpress Server for our commerical online publishing.

HTH