Free PDF Creator?

edited January 2011 in Chit chat
Quick question: Can anyone here please recommend me a decent, free PDF creation proggie?

I need one for my PC at work. Tried downloading one but it wouldn't install for some reason, and I just wondered if anyone here knew of any free ones that actually work properly before I go about downloading another.

:smile:
Post edited by GreenCard on

Comments

  • edited December 2010
    GreenCard wrote: »
    Quick question: Can anyone here please recommend me a decent, free PDF creation proggie?

    I need one for my PC at work. Tried downloading one but it wouldn't install for some reason, and I just wondered if anyone here knew of any free ones that actually work properly before I go about downloading another.

    :smile:

    have you got admin rights at work to install things?
  • edited December 2010
    GreenCard wrote: »
    Quick question: Can anyone here please recommend me a decent, free PDF creation proggie?

    I need one for my PC at work. Tried downloading one but it wouldn't install for some reason, and I just wondered if anyone here knew of any free ones that actually work properly before I go about downloading another.

    :smile:

    If you've got admin rights I'd recommend Primo PDF. It works like a printer driver, so you can generate pdfs from any application:

    www.primopdf.com/

    If not, there's a free web-based converter here. It's not brilliant, but it does the job for the most common formats:

    http://www.freepdfconvert.com/
  • edited December 2010
    Yup, I have admin rights on this PC, so I'll give that top one a go. Cheers guys. :smile:
  • edited December 2010
    Primopdf is brilliant - I've used it for years.
  • edited December 2010
    Aye, I've just given it a whirl, and it works a treat. Thanks again Matt_B. :smile:
  • edited December 2010
    Good :) I trust you are well Mr. Card?
  • edited December 2010
    I'd recommend subscribing to the RSS feed of Give Away of the Day:

    http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

    If you don't know what it is, every day a commercial piece of software is given away to install that day only and use, well, forever. 90% of the time it's worthless crap but there is the occasional gem and normally someone will provide links to an open source alternative.

    You very often get something along the lines you're looking for.
  • edited December 2010
    itsallgood wrote: »
    Good :) I trust you are well Mr. Card?

    Yes, yes, can't complain, cheers dude. I hope all is good at your end, as your name would suggest. :smile:
    Vampyre wrote: »
    I'd recommend subscribing to the RSS feed of Give Away of the Day:

    http://www.giveawayoftheday.com/

    If you don't know what it is, every day a commercial piece of software is given away to install that day only and use, well, forever. 90% of the time it's worthless crap but there is the occasional gem and normally someone will provide links to an open source alternative.

    You very often get something along the lines you're looking for.

    Oooo, thanks Vampyre, I'll do that. This PC I'm using is a new replacement for one I was using that completely died last week, and every day I discover that I'm missing some piece of software I had that I really need, so that'll no doubt come in handy at some point. :smile:
  • edited December 2010
    OpenOffice exports to PDF.

    Also if you need to do a *lot* of PDFs you can automate the process with ImageMagick (also open source) and a script. ImageMagick handles pretty much any image format. If you need to convert TIFFs, there is also the combination of tiffcp and tiff2pdf.
  • edited December 2010
    Winston wrote: »
    OpenOffice exports to PDF.

    Also if you need to do a *lot* of PDFs you can automate the process with ImageMagick (also open source) and a script. ImageMagick handles pretty much any image format. If you need to convert TIFFs, there is also the combination of tiffcp and tiff2pdf.

    I'd not even heard of OpenOffice until I read this post yesterday... I've been using an unregistered MS Office at work, which is a real pain because it won't let me use many of the functions I need without a product key. Been using OpenOffice today, and it's great... the Excel bit seems somewhat buggy (could just be me though), but I can do everything I need to do within OpenOffice now, so many thanks to you too Winston. :smile:
  • edited December 2010
    GreenCard wrote: »
    I'd not even heard of OpenOffice until I read this post yesterday... I've been using an unregistered MS Office at work, which is a real pain because it won't let me use many of the functions I need without a product key. Been using OpenOffice today, and it's great... the Excel bit seems somewhat buggy (could just be me though), but I can do everything I need to do within OpenOffice now, so many thanks to you too Winston. :smile:

    You're not the first and you certainly won't be the last to find the beauty of Open Source/Free software. It took me the best part of a decade to get out of the commercial stuff (altho I still use it daily for my day job). You'll be installing a flavour of Linux next ;-) And on that day, my friend, you will truly be a geek ;-)
  • edited December 2010
    Vampyre wrote: »
    You're not the first and you certainly won't be the last to find the beauty of Open Source/Free software. It took me the best part of a decade to get out of the commercial stuff (altho I still use it daily for my day job). You'll be installing a flavour of Linux next ;-) And on that day, my friend, you will truly be a geek ;-)

    Hmmm, yes, Linux... I'll have to look into that. ;)
  • edited January 2011
    Sorry to bump this thread again folks...

    Can someone here please tell me how I can go about finding what graphics card I have in my work PC, without opening it up? I've noticed in the device manager that the drivers aren't installed properly, and I have no idea as to how to find out which drivers I need. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. :smile:
  • edited January 2011
    If its a work PC you might not have one. It might be the onboard graphics device.

    have a search on google for the PC's make, if it's an off the shelf job.

    I did that with my laptop and found all the drivers in one place.
  • edited January 2011
    Cheers dude. :smile:

    I've just had a look on Google; found the drivers disc, but it's ?10!?
  • edited January 2011
    GreenCard wrote: »
    Cheers dude. :smile:

    I've just had a look on Google; found the drivers disc, but it's ?10!?

    you should be able to find them for download somewhere, just google again.

    as i said i did it for my laptop and thats about 5 years old. so you should be alright. someone will have it hosted somewhere.
  • edited January 2011
    Try going to the website of the graphics card manufacturer (Nvidia, ATi, Intel, etc.) and you can usually get the latest ones for free.

    If you're still not sure what card you've got, there's a free program called 3DP Chip (probably some others too) that'll try to detect it automatically.
  • edited January 2011
    Matt_B wrote: »
    If you're still not sure what card you've got, there's a free program called 3DP Chip (probably some others too) that'll try to detect it automatically.

    Excellent... that sounds like it's exactly what I need. Cheers Matt. :smile:
  • fogfog
    edited January 2011
    speccy will help ya find what it is...

    no really.. :)

    http://www.filehippo.com/download_speccy

    the majority of cards are either nvidia / ati... or if it's a laptop intel onboard

    but the whole thing about folk and office program.. makes me laugh, i see it in so many reviews "oh it didn't come with an office program"
  • edited January 2011
    Cheers for the info, fog. :smile:

    Just before I left work, I managed to get as far as discovering it's an ATI Radeon of some description. When I get a moment free tomorrow, I'll have a go at finding drivers for it (the 3DP Chip thing did find drivers, but they contained malware, so I binned them... it did identify the card though, which was a result in itself).
  • edited January 2011
    GreenCard wrote: »
    Cheers for the info, fog. :smile:

    Just before I left work, I managed to get as far as discovering it's an ATI Radeon of some description. When I get a moment free tomorrow, I'll have a go at finding drivers for it (the 3DP Chip thing did find drivers, but they contained malware, so I binned them... it did identify the card though, which was a result in itself).

    It's probably a false positive. Lots of virus scanners report 3DP Chip as malware.

    That said, to be doubly safe, just use it to identify the card and download the drivers from the ATI website. You can make sure you get the latest ones that way too.
  • edited January 2011
    Matt_B wrote: »
    It's probably a false positive. Lots of virus scanners report 3DP Chip as malware.

    That said, to be doubly safe, just use it to identify the card and download the drivers from the ATI website. You can make sure you get the latest ones that way too.

    Yep, I've done that... the card is an ATI Radeon HD 5200. I've tried to download drivers for it, went to the official site, all I could find was a program called "Catalyst", which I installed. The card now shows up as a Radeon HD 3200, and when I start the PC it won't let me use any resolution higher than the bare minumum. I then have to uninstall the card and restart, which works fine and displays at a higher resolution, but when I go to the device manager, it still says Radeon 3200 (and whenever I boot up the PC I have to uninstall the card and start over again). :sad:

    I found another download, suppposedly for a driver, but it was actually something called "Driver Detective" (or something like that), and it wouldn't let me do anything unless I payed ?30-odd for it. :mad:
  • edited January 2011
    GreenCard wrote: »
    Yep, I've done that... the card is an ATI Radeon HD 5200. I've tried to download drivers for it, went to the official site, all I could find was a program called "Catalyst", which I installed. The card now shows up as a Radeon HD 3200, and when I start the PC it won't let me use any resolution higher than the bare minumum. I then have to uninstall the card and restart, which works fine and displays at a higher resolution, but when I go to the device manager, it still says Radeon 3200 (and whenever I boot up the PC I have to uninstall the card and start over again). :sad:

    I found another download, suppposedly for a driver, but it was actually something called "Driver Detective" (or something like that), and it wouldn't let me do anything unless I payed ?30-odd for it. :mad:

    when i downaloaded the newest driver for my ATI radeon GFX card, it wouldn't install due to a conflict with another program. i had to download a hotfix from msdn.

    my pc now goes into an infinity loop when i scroll i a web page too fast and crashes. (its a known problem)

    I am gonna have to reinstall the older version of the driver.

    im not gonna buy ATI in the future.

    ;)

    honestly, what i would do it physically look at the card and make sure you know exactly what you using. then try a few different version of the driver. :p
  • edited January 2011
    Back to PDF generators.
    I've been using PDF Redirect for years.
    http://www.exp-systems.com/PDFreDirect/Downloads.htm?1

    If you leave the popup window open after your first print, you can "add" additional prints to the same single PDF file.
  • edited January 2011
    I've got a PDF creator which is used as a printer driver of sorts - you set the document to print, but select the PDF creator, 'print', type in a filename and it gets coverted.

    It does work - I made a book for someone back in 2005/6 and he had it professionally printed using it.
  • edited January 2011
    mile wrote: »
    when i downaloaded the newest driver for my ATI radeon GFX card, it wouldn't install due to a conflict with another program. i had to download a hotfix from msdn.

    my pc now goes into an infinity loop when i scroll i a web page too fast and crashes. (its a known problem)

    I am gonna have to reinstall the older version of the driver.

    im not gonna buy ATI in the future.

    ;)

    honestly, what i would do it physically look at the card and make sure you know exactly what you using. then try a few different version of the driver. :p

    The only driver I seem to be able to find is this Catalyst thingy, which just causes me more grief. I've actually managed to uninstall it properly now, so I'm back to square one, but at least I don't have to "uninstall" it every time I fire up the PC. It's all starting to do me head in...

    As you can see, I'm not too clued up with all this stuff. :grin:
  • edited January 2011
    GreenCard wrote: »
    The only driver I seem to be able to find is this Catalyst thingy, which just causes me more grief. I've actually managed to uninstall it properly now, so I'm back to square one, but at least I don't have to "uninstall" it every time I fire up the PC. It's all starting to do me head in...

    As you can see, I'm not too clued up with all this stuff. :grin:

    catalyst is the correct thing. its the driver and a little control center for the card. it will put a icon on your tool bar which you can open and change the settings of your graphics card.

    you should really check the card itself, maybe the device finder thing made a mistake.
  • edited January 2011
    mile wrote: »
    catalyst is the correct thing. its the driver and a little control center for the card. it will put a icon on your tool bar which you can open and change the settings of your graphics card.

    you should really check the card itself, maybe the device finder thing made a mistake.

    I might open it up at the end of the day... need to make up some time anyway, thanks to some ridiculous traffic this morning, so it'll give me something to do to pass the extra time. :smile:
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