racoma.com.phJ. Angelo Racoma on technology, economics, writing, problogging, and getting things done

In this Inq7.net infotech article, Jerry Liao writes on generating PDF files directly from MS Word. 
What Jerry forgot to indicate is that you would need a PDF printer
driver installed on your system to do this.  Or perhaps he forgot
to mention if he’s using a new, souped-up version of MS Office.

It’s unfortunate that MS Word, or any other Office app for that matter,
does not let you print directly to PDF outright (a feature that OpenOffice.org
has native support for).  I consider it a limitation of MS Office:
not being able to output directly to PDF.  IMHO, that’s come to be
a required feature, especially with the ever-increasing need to
exchange documents via electronic means.  PDF files generally
appear better because they’re formatted just the way the author intends
them to be.  And they’re virus-free!  No Word macros to mess up your system.

While the Adobe reader
is a free download, Adobe’s own tools for generating PDFs are
not.  But there are a handful of free PDF-generation software
available as freeware or shareware.  I personally use PDF995,
which is basically a printer driver that allows me to generate PDF from
any application that can make printouts.  It’s adware (it makes
your browser point to the Software995 website everytime you print out
to PDF), but I can manage.

• Tweet
• "&title=""">

Share: