pdf file creation using Linux apps

pdf file creation using Linux apps

[James Miller]

Greetings, all.

I have recently discovered the ability of certain Linux word processing
apps to create pdf files. What I'm referring to here is the print to
file feature, i.e. printing an OpenOffice or M$Word file to pdf. This is
really useful for my work, and could save me plenty over the competing
Adobe product:) . The ones I've used so far are KWord (what a flaky
program!) and OpenOffice. When KWord can be operated with some degree of
sanity, it seems to produce the most compatible pdf files. I'm reluctant
to use it though: certain activities such as fiddling with the font type
drop down menu have the disastrous effect of killing XWindows. Yes, merely
glancing through that menu can cause X to simply obliterate, finally bringing
me back to the login prompt (gpm, I think) when things return to normalcy.
My comment on the flakiness of that app aside, what I'd really like to ask
concerns the pdf's I've created with OpenOffice (1.0). They look and display
fine under GV. But Adobe Acrobat Reader will not display them, claiming they
are corrupt. Does anyone have any idea why this is so and/or any pointers on
how to make Adobe be as happy with them as GV is?

I suppose I should also ask if others may have had such experience with
KWord as I have? I don't know whether this is the bugginess of the
program, or perhaps that the creator of the distro I use has "specially
tweaked" their Debian so that it will run KDE3.01.

Thanks, James

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Re: pdf file creation using Linux apps

[Brian Jackson]

I don't know if you can get ahold of a newer version of koffice, but I had the 
kind of stability problems with older versions. The newest version seems to 
be about as close to stable as the rest of my system. (I've learned not to 
expect perfection unless I want to help make it that way)

--Brian


On Friday 28 February 2003 06:20 pm, James Miller wrote:
> Greetings, all.
>
> I have recently discovered the ability of certain Linux word processing
> apps to create pdf files. What I'm referring to here is the print to
> file feature, i.e. printing an OpenOffice or M$Word file to pdf. This is
> really useful for my work, and could save me plenty over the competing
> Adobe product:) . The ones I've used so far are KWord (what a flaky
> program!) and OpenOffice. When KWord can be operated with some degree of
> sanity, it seems to produce the most compatible pdf files. I'm reluctant
> to use it though: certain activities such as fiddling with the font type
> drop down menu have the disastrous effect of killing XWindows. Yes, merely
> glancing through that menu can cause X to simply obliterate, finally
> bringing me back to the login prompt (gpm, I think) when things return to
> normalcy. My comment on the flakiness of that app aside, what I'd really
> like to ask concerns the pdf's I've created with OpenOffice (1.0). They
> look and display fine under GV. But Adobe Acrobat Reader will not display
> them, claiming they are corrupt. Does anyone have any idea why this is so
> and/or any pointers on how to make Adobe be as happy with them as GV is?
>
> I suppose I should also ask if others may have had such experience with
> KWord as I have? I don't know whether this is the bugginess of the
> program, or perhaps that the creator of the distro I use has "specially
> tweaked" their Debian so that it will run KDE3.01.
>
> Thanks, James
>
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> To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-newbie" in
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Re: pdf file creation using Linux apps

[Ken Moffat]

On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, James Miller wrote:

> 
> I have recently discovered the ability of certain Linux word processing
> apps to create pdf files. What I'm referring to here is the print to
> file feature, i.e. printing an OpenOffice or M$Word file to pdf. This is
> really useful for my work, and could save me plenty over the competing
> Adobe product:) . The ones I've used so far are KWord (what a flaky
> program!) and OpenOffice. When KWord can be operated with some degree of
> sanity, it seems to produce the most compatible pdf files. I'm reluctant
> to use it though: certain activities such as fiddling with the font type
> drop down menu have the disastrous effect of killing XWindows. Yes, merely
> glancing through that menu can cause X to simply obliterate, finally bringing
> me back to the login prompt (gpm, I think) when things return to normalcy.
> My comment on the flakiness of that app aside, what I'd really like to ask
> concerns the pdf's I've created with OpenOffice (1.0). They look and display
> fine under GV. But Adobe Acrobat Reader will not display them, claiming they
> are corrupt. Does anyone have any idea why this is so and/or any pointers on
> how to make Adobe be as happy with them as GV is?
> 

 There seems to be a range of partial-compliance between different
versions of pdf-aware packages.  I haven't tried Open Office yet, but
I've noticed that kde-3.1 (specifically, kghostview) needs the espgs
version of ghostscript, and even then it canot read occasional
documents such as a UK government "white paper" which was probably
created in Acrobat.  xpdf (using espgs) has so far read everything I've
tried,  but siag-office fails to read a lot of pdfs, and other packages
fail to read some of its pdfs.  My only advice is to have as wide a
range of options as you can for incoming pdfs.

Ken
-- 
 Out of the darkness a voice spake unto me, saying "smile, things could be
worse". So I smiled, and lo, things became worse.



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RE: pdf file creation using Linux apps

[James Miller]

On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, Brian Jackson wrote:

> be about as close to stable as the rest of my system. (I've learned not to
> expect perfection unless I want to help make it that way)
>
I guess I don't consider expecting an application not to kill the Xserver just
in the course of normal use "perfection."

On Sat, 1 Mar 2003, Ken Moffat wrote:
>
>  There seems to be a range of partial-compliance between different
> versions of pdf-aware packages.  I haven't tried Open Office yet, but
> I've noticed that kde-3.1 (specifically, kghostview) needs the espgs
> version of ghostscript, and even then it canot read occasional
> documents such as a UK government "white paper" which was probably
> created in Acrobat.  xpdf (using espgs) has so far read everything I've
> tried,  but siag-office fails to read a lot of pdfs, and other packages
> fail to read some of its pdfs.  My only advice is to have as wide a
> range of options as you can for incoming pdfs.
>
I have several pdf reading progs on my machine, so my concern is not so
much with being able to read pdfs. It's more with creating them, and,
specifically, creating files compatible with Adobe Reader. Most people who
will be reading such pdf files as I create will be viewing them with
Adobe's pdf product. So far, all documents I've created with KWord have
been compatible with Acrobat Reader (maybe 4 or 5 documents?). Those
created under OpenOffice and, if I recall correctly, Abiword, have not been
compatible. Since I'm running a system that is largely Debian Woody, I can't
easily upgrade the KOffice I have. Does anyone know of other apps that
create/convert to pdf that are largely compatible with Adobe Acrobat Reader?
Is there another list where I should pose this sort of question?

Thanks, James
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Re: pdf file creation using Linux apps

[Brian Jackson]

On Saturday 01 March 2003 07:17 pm, James Miller wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Feb 2003, Brian Jackson wrote:
> > be about as close to stable as the rest of my system. (I've learned not
> > to expect perfection unless I want to help make it that way)
>
> I guess I don't consider expecting an application not to kill the Xserver
> just in the course of normal use "perfection."

My point was that the newer versions are much more stable, but they can always 
use more work. It's much the same with many projects that large out there. I 
would say the newer koffice versions are more stable for me than mozilla is. 
That should give you a pretty good reference point. As is the case with most 
situations, my system is probably a lot different than yours, so YMMV.

--Brian

<snip>
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Re: pdf file creation using Linux apps

[Theo. Sean Schulze]

On Sat, Mar 01, 2003 at 07:17:42PM -0600, James Miller hunted and pecked out:
[snip]
> I have several pdf reading progs on my machine, so my concern is not so
> much with being able to read pdfs. It's more with creating them, and,
> specifically, creating files compatible with Adobe Reader. Most people who
> will be reading such pdf files as I create will be viewing them with
> Adobe's pdf product. So far, all documents I've created with KWord have
> been compatible with Acrobat Reader (maybe 4 or 5 documents?). Those
> created under OpenOffice and, if I recall correctly, Abiword, have not been
> compatible. Since I'm running a system that is largely Debian Woody, I can't
> easily upgrade the KOffice I have. Does anyone know of other apps that
> create/convert to pdf that are largely compatible with Adobe Acrobat Reader?
> Is there another list where I should pose this sort of question?

If you don't mind using a command line tool, then you might want to save the documents as PostScript files and then use ps2pdf13 to convert to PDF format.  I have been using ps2pdf13 for a little while now to convert man pages to pdf format, and I have never had one not load in Acrobat Reader.  My thought is that PostScript is a well recognized format that each of the word processors you've mentioned should be able to master, and they may be able to do PostScript better than they can do PDF.

Take one of your documents, save it as a PostScript file, and then convert it to see how well it works.  From the command line:

ps2pdf13 mydocument.ps mydocument.pdf

ps2pdf13 has several related applications giving varying levels of Acrobat compatibility.  Try `man ps2pdf` to get the full story.

HTH,
Sean

-- 
Theo. Sean Schulze
tschulze@teamfinders.org
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RE: pdf file creation using Linux apps

[Amin]

On 1 Mar 2003 at 19:17, James Miller wrote:

[snip]

> easily upgrade the KOffice I have. Does anyone know of other apps that
> create/convert to pdf that are largely compatible with Adobe Acrobat Reader?

If you're willing to invest some time in learning LaTeX, 
you can use ``pdflatex'' to create PDF files that are 
completely compatible/standard.  Here's a little insight: 
Leslie Lamport, the creator of LaTeX, remarked that LaTeX 
is for that 2% of computer users which thinks logically.

> Is there another list where I should pose this sort of question?

comp.text.tex has ongoing discussions on how to produce the 
best-quality documents with TeX, or LaTeX.

Regards, Yawar Amin
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RE: pdf file creation using Linux apps

[James Miller]

On Sun, 2 Mar 2003, Theo. Sean Schulze wrote:

> If you don't mind using a command line tool, then you might want to save the
documents as PostScript files and then use ps2pdf13 to convert to PDF format.
I have been using ps2pdf13 for a little while now to convert man pages to pdf format,
and I have never had one not load in Acrobat Reader.  My thought is that PostScript
is a well recognized format that each of the word processors you've mentioned should
be able to master, and they may be able to do PostScript better than they can do PDF.
>
> Take one of your documents, save it as a PostScript file, and then convert it to see
how well it works.  From the command line:
>
> ps2pdf13 mydocument.ps mydocument.pdf
>
> ps2pdf13 has several related applications giving varying levels of Acrobat compatibility.
Try `man ps2pdf` to get the full story.
>
Great advice, Sean. It worked like a charm: the doc that I could not
convert to Adobe's liking using either Abiword or OpenOffice displays just
fine after converting to .ps and then to .pdf using the utility you
mentioned. Thanks so much for your input. This will be a very helpful
application for me.

James
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