Creating and Managing Your Own PDFs With Free Software

Creating PDF's with Free Software

Anyone who has downloaded a document from the Internet is probably aware of the PDF document format, a format that was created by Adobe Software, which allows users to create documents that can be viewed on many different platforms.  The strength of the PDF format is that the reproduction will always look exactly like the original.

If I send a Word document or Excel spreadsheet to someone, I must assume that they have Word or Excel to view the file.  These are expensive programs, and not everyone has them.  Furthermore, if the document is to look like my original, the recipient must also have exactly the same fonts installed on his/her computer as I have on mine.



But anyone can download Adobe Reader (or any number of alternatives) for free.  Therefore, if I can produce a PDF, I can be assured that virtually anyone can view my document exactly as I intended it to look, including all fonts and formatting.

That if, though is where the challenge lies, for while Adobe Reader (the PDF viewer) is free, Adobe Acrobat (the PDF creator) is not.  This is a common business/revenue model in Internet-related media software:  give away the viewer, charge for the creator.  Apple does the same thing with Quicktime, Real Media with Real Player, and so on.

Fortunately, if all we want to create is a static text document, we have free alternatives.  These programs all work in essentially the same way; they install themselves as printer drivers.  When the user wants to create a PDF file, he simply prints the file to PDF by selecting the PDF printer driver.  I should point out that many of these products are Windows-only.  While that may seem to be a limitation, it is not, since most Linux and Mac applications have the built-in ability to generate PDF documents without additional software.

• PDF Creator is a free, open source product.  Earlier versions did not work well with Windows Vista, but that short-coming has been corrected in the latest version.  It has the advantage of being a single-file download, and it is easy to use.  Simply print the document (Word, Excel, Publisher, ...) to the PDF Creator printer driver, add any tags/information you might want to include in the file, and save it.
• CutePDF Writer is another reliable, free (though not open source) product.  It has the advantage of being somewhat simpler to use because it offers fewer options than PDF creator.  On the downside, downloading and installation is complicated slightly by the fact that there are two files to download and each must be installed separately.  First the user must download and install the open source Ghostscript converter, which actually performs the PDF conversion (and is bundled into PDF Creator).  Next he must do the same for CutePDF Writer itself, which provides the user interface for the conversion process.

If you would like to learn more about creating your own PDF files, you may want to watch this video tutorial, which walks you through the process with PDF Creator.

A footnote:  Open Office, because it has its nascence in the open source world, can create PDF files without any additional software.  This is also true of Inkscape and a number of other open source products.

Combining Existing PDF Files with PDFsam

On occasion, we may have existing PDF files which we would like to combine or merge.  For example, someone might send you aa PDF document, and you would like to add to it or place a cover page on it.  Or you have scanned pages with your scanner; each page you scanned has produced an individual PDF document, and you would like to merge these pages into a single file.

Again, that can certainly be done with Adobe Acrobat, but that costs money, and teachers are notoriously stingy when it comes to such things.  And why not?

Once again, open source software comes to the rescue, in this case a program called PDFsam (PDF Split and Merge).  PDFsam allows the user to easily combine existing PDF documents into a single document.

To learn how to download and use PDFsam, watch this video tutorial.

Oh, one more thing about scanning to PDF ...

Are you aware that your photocopier can most likely scan to PDF?  In fact, it can combine multiple page scans into a single PDF file without any software intervention at all.

If, like most schools in our Division, your school has a Toshiba copier, then it most likely has that ability.  The only tricky part may be accessing the document once it's scanned, since the copier saves it to a local hard drive in the copier itself; however, this hard drive is accessible across your network.  If you need help in learning how to use this feature, contact your Elearning Catalyst Teacher.

Or, you can simply have the photocopier email you the PDF file.  Yeah, it can do that too.