Creating PDFs from Word

Some of you have probably come across PDF995, a little utility that will allow you to create Adobe Portable Document Format files from Word and other documents. It is installs as a printer driver and its principal drawback is that it pops up some advertising whenever you create a new document.

PDF995 is actually based on the free Open Source ghostscript utility. Ghostscript is a viewer for Adobe PostScript files that can also generate PDF output. PDF995 actually removes some quite useful functionality such as the ability to control the document title which is useful for search engines and to adjust the quality of the document. This can result in quite impressive compression values for users who are more interested in text.

Post Script Printer Drivers

To roll your own PDF files you need to download ghostscript. We installed it as part of excellent Redhat Cygwin package but binaries are available separately for a number of platforms. You will also need to install a PostScript printer driver and optionally install RedMon, a package for redirecting a Windows printer port to Ghostscript.

The Hewlett-Packard HP color laserjet 8500 driver will let you print custom paper sizes in full colour and include softfonts. When you install the driver use "File:" as the printer port. See the RedMon package if you want to spool directly to ghostscript.

Creating a Custom Paper Type

If you are producing files for specific paper sizes, for example for Lulu.com Print on Demand books you will need to set-up a custom paper size that corresponds to your document template. You can do this under Windows from the control panel:

Control Panel --> Printers --> File --> Server Properties:

Custom Paper Size under Windows XP

Click on create new form and enter the Form name and paper size. This form will be available when you print (depending on the printer driver).

Customising the Document Title

A number of search engines, particularly Google, can index document formats other than the Web's native HTML. After printing and saving your document look for a file with a .ps or .prn extension. Open the file with your favourite text editor, Wordpad, vi, emacs, whatever and find the line: %%Title:, you can change the text after the title element to something that describes your document.

Printing as PostScript

As usual click

File -> Print:

and select the Properties then Advanced buttons.

Advanced Print Options on Windows 2000

You can select your custom paper size and include softfonts with the PDF document.

Converting to PDF

Ghostscript is really quite flexible in the options it gives for converting to PDF. The most useful is the PDFSETTINGS option. This controls the amount of compression applied to the PDF file. The major difference is in image quality. This is an example for a 19 page document with images and tables

To run the command type:

c:/usr/gs/gs8.33/bin/gswin32.exe" -q -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress -sOutputFile=outfile.pdf printfile.prn

This will open the ghostscript application which will process the pages. Type exit to quit the viewer. You will now have a nice PDF document with the correct document size shown in the bottom left of the Adobe Acrobat viewer.

Other settings are described in the ghostscript documentation

GhostScript Download

http://prdownloads.sourceforge.net/ghostscript/

These instructions have been tested with Ghostscript 8.33 on Windows XP/SP2 and on Windows 2000/SP2.

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