[thelist] word to pdf?

[viveka]

At 2:29pm -0600 11/3/02, Burhan Khalid wrote:
>When I installed Adobe Acrobat 5.0, it automatically put the toolbar on
>Word (Office 2000). It had a button to directly create a PDF from the
>current document. I think it was just a script that worked with Distiller.
>Thought I'd add it in there. If the toolbar doesn't show, you might want to
>check your options/toolbar settings.

I don't actually *have* Word; I eschew all MS products except for IE,
which I need for development. Any time anyone sends me a Word file, I
convert it to PDF to read it. Here's how:

1. Doubleclick on it.

This opens the file in DOCtor, which is a free GUI front end for
Antiword, which converts the word file to Postscript. If I could be
bothered, I could pay the makers of DOCtor $20 or so to enable the
last step. Instead, I

2. doubleclick on the DOCtor window, which takes me the the
Postscript file it generated, and drag it to the Home button on my
toolbar. Then, I

3. go to the terminal, and run ps2pdf, which I believe came with
Ghostscript. Here's the command line:

ps2pdf <filename>.ps <filename>.pdf

Now there's a PDF file of the Word file in my home directory, which I
can view in Preview or Acrobat Reader.

Here's DOCtor (free):
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=12575&db=mac

And here's PStill to complete the picture ($69 this month, normally $129):
http://www.stone.com/PStill/PStill.html

Or there are various ways to do the PStill step for free, but with
less convenience"

Here's MacGSView for OS X (free):
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/macos/index.htm
with a link to the required Ghostscript libraries too (also free).

It looks like there's a frontend for ps2pdf available too, in case
that brief shell command above is too scary:
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=13414&db=mac

Or here's MacGhostView, which seems to have both Ghostscript and a
frontend, for $20 - apparently more stable but slower than MacGSView:
http://www.versiontracker.com/moreinfo.fcgi?id=7503&db=mac

Regards,

V.

--
Viveka Weiley, Karmanaut.
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