How do I make a PDF file?

frisco

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My novel is written in Microsoft word 2003. The cover of my book is Photoshop (or PNC). Now I entered the ABNA and I have the option to get a free printed copy of my entry, but it says the files uploaded have to be PDF. Anyone got any advice on how I would go about converting them to that format?
 

Collectonian

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If you don't have Adobe Acrobat or Adobe Flash Paper, you can do it online at http://createpdf.adobe.com/ which lets you do 5 for free. There is also a free PDF writer called CutePDF, but I've never used it: http://www.cutepdf.com/ and I think OpenOffice can do PDF files as well.
 

DeleyanLee

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Adobe's website used to have a feature that, if you signed up, you got 5 (I think it was) free translations into PDF. That was a few years ago, but they might still do it.

Word 2007 has the feature built-in, if you know someone who has Word 2007.
 

AliceAnderson

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Easy PDF

The easiest way to create a PDF is to get a free GoogleDocs account, paste your cover and book text into a Document. Then go to File > Download as > PDF. I've done this several times for projects and for my clients projects. It always works like a charm.
 

Chris P

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Microsoft will let you download a free pdf maker for Word 2003 (or at least it used to. They might have stopped supporting that since Word 2007 came out).

The latest version of Open Office allows save as pdf, but I've not used it and I don't know if you need additional plug ins.
 

kuwisdelu

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And in the interest of the stickie, in case any Mac users have the same question, it's as simple as:

File -> Print (Cmd + P)

Then click the PDF button and choose "save as PDF."
 

princecarspian

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If you own Acrobat you can create PDFs from virtually any program that can print. Once you've installed Acrobat, you'll find that you have a new printer driver called AdobePDF.To give it a quick trial run, open any document, choose the AdobePDF driver and print. It will ask you to supply a name for your PDF file. Give it one, click OK and you've made a PDFYou can also convert any valid PostScript file to PDF using Distiller manually
 
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I just click save as in my document and click PDF or XPS, but then again I have Word 2007, so...I had Word 2003 five years ago and I don't remember if they give you that option. I never had to make a PDF five years ago, so I didn't quite look into that. I used to use DocPDF when I didn't know I had that option in Word '07. It's easy, you just make DocPDF your printer, or one of them for that matter, and if you have another printer installed, make sure you have DocPDF selected as your printer before you go to save it as PDF, click Print, and it turns your Word document into PDF for you. You have to wait until it opens in your Adobe Reader, and then it's done. Otherwise the document won't be converted. It takes a while depending on how many pages your document has. My 500-page novels formatted in 4x7 book size would take me about 2 mins.
 

Matera the Mad

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I'd also like to put in a good word for Nitro PDF. I've been testing it lately, and it is my current default reader. It is good for converting almost anything to PDF, and one of the best I've ever used for extracting text or images. It can extract text intelligently, better than Adobe, producing a plain text file with very few unnecessary line breaks.

LOL, how to make and unmake a PDF.
 

Ken

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... I bought ABBYY PDF Transformer two years back for $90. Works well. No need to make the investment though with the options above. I do have to say that one of the reasons I made the investment was that some of the freeware didn't always work, including Adobe's free 5. My docs got bungled in the conversion. I was doing nonstandard stuff though with charts and whatnot. With straight text, conversions would probably go fine with freeware 99 times in a 100.
 

littlebear91

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i still don't get why microsoft word is so popular, I still like openoffice better, just file->save as-> export to pdf.
 

Diamons

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Why has nobody mentioned Google Docs? Simply upload and save it as a PDF.
 

Matera the Mad

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i still don't get why microsoft word is so popular, I still like openoffice better, just file->save as-> export to pdf.
Not that I'm awfully into defending M$, but MSOffice does have an excellent PDF conversion add-in.

LOLz @ belated mention of the Google trick
 

Deleted member 42

Not to be err, boasting, but .pdf generation is built into Mac OSX at the system level.

Any app that can print or save can generate a .pdf.

If you know how to use Terminal, you can include/not include fonts, or generate a variety of postscript files.

Not that, you know, I'm bragging . . .
 

kuwisdelu

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Not to be err, boasting, but .pdf generation is built into Mac OSX at the system level.

Any app that can print or save can generate a .pdf.

If you know how to use Terminal, you can include/not include fonts, or generate a variety of postscript files.

Not that, you know, I'm bragging . . .

And just in case any Mac users ever get in the situation where they have a bunch of picture files they want to join into a PDF...

Select the files, select all (Cmd + A) and open them (Cmd + O) in Preview. In Preview, select all the images again (Cmd + O), and then go to File->Print Selected Images. Then do as I said in post #11, and click the PDF button and Save as PDF. Voila, your pictures are now joined together into a PDF file.

Dunno how often the rest of you find yourself in that situation... but I find it pretty useful.
 

JulieBeth

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I have found while a lot of these work great, many of them don't convert hyperlinks well. If you have hyperlinks, the only thing so far that has worked well is adobe itself, but you only get five for free. :( Google docs works, but it adds their *funny-looking* hyperlink, that is plain ugly. Does anyone have any recommendations for one that also converts hyperlinks (free)? :)
 

Rob_In_MN

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Another vote for CutePDF. it installs as a printer on your computer, so you just select print (from any program) and you use the cutePDF printer. Once it "prints" you get a dialog box prompting you to save your pdf file. I like it a lot.

edit: don't recall how CutePDF handles hyperlinks.