Creating your own PDF's?

Serious Paul · Post by **Serious Paul** » Sun Mar 25, 2012 5:47 pm

So any suggestions on how to make my own PDF files? Basically I want to construct my own character sheets for Shadowrun. Any suggestions would be welcome.

paladin2019 · Post by **paladin2019** » Sun Mar 25, 2012 6:11 pm

I know Word allows you save as pdf, Excel might as well.

3278 · Post by **3278** » Sun Mar 25, 2012 8:09 pm

What is it you'd like to create a PDF out of? See, a PDF is created not whole and entire as a thing unto itself, it's something you convert an existing document to. So you've got a Word file, and you want to make it so people without word [but with Reader] can view it, then you snag this puppy. But as a rule, the thing you need to make PDFs out of whatever is Acrobat, Adobe's product made specifically for making PDFs out of shit. It's expensive, but, you know, widely available at the low, low price of $torrent.

Serious Paul · Post by **Serious Paul** » Sun Mar 25, 2012 8:09 pm

Assuming I don't have Word, and can I create something useful with that sort of thing or not? I honestly don't know.

3278 · Post by **3278** » Sun Mar 25, 2012 8:13 pm

Well, now that I think about it, there's an extension for OpenOffice that'll do PDF open, edit, and convert.

Nicephorus · Post by **Nicephorus** » Sun Mar 25, 2012 10:17 pm

There are quite a few pdf print drivers. Once installed, you click print in any software, and choose pdf as the printer output.

Ancient History · Post by **Ancient History** » Mon Mar 26, 2012 12:14 am

PrimoPDF is pretty solid for the print-to-pdf option, I've used it a bit.

Serious Paul · Post by **Serious Paul** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 8:44 am

Hmmm, and suddenly I have too many options. Crap. Okay well if I get any free time again this gives me a starting point right?

UncleJoseph · Post by **UncleJoseph** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 10:52 am

Serious Paul wrote:Hmmm, and suddenly I have too many options. Crap. Okay well if I get any free time again this gives me a starting point right?

I have been using OpenOffice (completely free) for a long time now as an alternative to Microsoft Office. OpenOffice is a complete office suite that includes the ability to read almost all of Microsoft's document formats, including the new XML coding they started using with Office 2007 (I think that's when they started using it). With OpenOffice, you can export spreadsheets or word processor documents to PDF format...it's very easy. OpenOffice is also a very efficient piece of software and doesn't take up much space on the hard drive. I also have Microsoft Office 2010, but I often prefer OpenOffice. It's not 100% compatible with Microsoft (occasionally you will get formatting errors in one or the other if you're opening a file from one suite in another, but generally it works fine).

I highly recommend going this route unless you want to be able to directly edit PDFs. Otherwise, if you're creating from scratch, just create and edit in OpenOffice Writer, and then save/export the final document to PDF. This is exactly what I do for the PDFs on my website.

3278 · Post by **3278** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 11:27 am

And if I'm not mistaken, you guys already have OpenOffice, yeah?

Serious Paul · Post by **Serious Paul** » Tue Mar 27, 2012 11:46 pm

Yup. Free time and an actual brain are all that stand in the way of my success.