Dear EFers,

I am about to start pulling my hair with this matter Maybe you could help?.....

I need to create a series of PDFs from MS Word. Acrobat 9 on line pdf maker is not really being very helpful (to say something positive). Tried also to use PDFCreator (sourceforge.net), but it keeps asking me for strange pluggins. Other softwares just start putting watermarks all over.... Openoffice converts docs into PDFs, but then i run into a formation issue with my originals.

Is there any free software that you might being using / recommending for this purpose?

Thanks in advance for your help,

Lucy

hello, try Open Office, that you may download in Sun´s page.

I have had no issues with the free version of PrimoPDF / ActivePDF which acts as a virtual printer. http://www.primopdf.com/

Manual available here: http://www.primopdf.com/pdfs/primopdf_UG_4-0.pdf

I used to use their free online version at http://online.primopdf.com/

http://freepdfxp.de/404.html

Used this for years, works great.

Need to install the GhostScript first.

Have you tried to simply hit print in MS word and then select pdf instead of your printer?

With Open Office if you use 'Save As' and save into MS Word format, then 'Export to PDF' your original will be untouched and the PDF should be OK

I fear the formatting error occurs when importing the Word files, not in OpenOffice's PDF converter.

I have converted loads of text documents with only very minor formatting variations. Perhaps I have just been lucky.

Hi,

if you are using Microsoft Office 2007 then you could just download the free addin from Microsoft which allows you to save as PDF. I use it very frequently.

2007 Microsoft Office Add-in: Microsoft Save as PDF or XPS

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/d...displaylang=en

Have fun

Martin

Thank you all for your help. I will try szhjcn suggestion, and let you know what is happening...

Just a small comment:
I am working with MS Word 2003, so i cannot update it with that Microsoft utility.
OpenOffice has no problems to import Word MS plain text documents. When you have images embedded or drawing objects, you have a good chance of finding them all over the places when you open the docs with OpenOffice. That is why i cannot use it...
The online PDF makers have the same problem - both Acrobat 9 and Primo PDF just messed up the whole document.

It will continue ...

I've been using CutePDF (which is freeware) for a year or more now with no problems. It is available to download from here:

http://www.cutepdf.com/

You can also use the ps2pdf web-page. Go to the Print box in MS Word, select a postscript printer (you'll need to download a generic postscript printer driver if you don't have a postscript printer already installed), then select the "print to file" option. It will save the file for you (I believe with the extension ".prn"), which you must then upload to the ps2pdf website, and shortly afterwards a pdf version will be linked from their website. I've never been sure about how secure this is, but I don't have anything that is of any interest to anyone else.

It sounds like some of the solutions above might be slightly easier. In fact, for Word documents, I don't even bother using MS Word and just use OpenOffice from the start, in which making pdf's is very easy. However, I use the ps2pdf trick when needing to make handouts of presentations from Powerpoint (follow the same procedure as I described above).

Many thanks for all your answers - i am now happily using CutePDF.

i use http://en.pdf24.org/ which does online conversion and send the pdf by email.