Word Hacks [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 23 Make PDFs Without Acrobat

PDF has become a nearly universal file format
for displaying documents. But while you can download Adobe Reader for
free, you must shell out nearly $300 for the full version if you want
to create PDFs. Fortunately, you can use the free Ghostscript and
GhostWord programs to create PDFs instead.

By taking advantage of some free
utilities, you can easily create full-featured PDFs from Word files
without purchasing the full version of Adobe Acrobat. The
Ghostscript utility, a freeware program
available for any platform, can create PDFs from
PostScript files. PostScript is
a page-description language understood by most printers, and it is
usually the format your files are converted to behind the scenes when
you send them to your printer.

From Word, you can print your document to a file instead of to a
printer; the file that''s created will likely be a
PostScript file if the printer driver you use is for a
PostScript-compatible printer. That means you can use Ghostscript to
create a PDF from the file.

To see whether your printer is a PostScript printer, print a small
document to file (select FilePrint and check the
"Print to file" box), then open the
file in a text editor such as Notepad. Though Word will give the file
a .prn extension, the file will still likely be
a PostScript file. PostScript files will have a line beginning with
the text %!PS near the top of the file, as shown
in Figure 3-41.

Figure 3-41. A PostScript file viewed in a text editor

If you don''t have a PostScript printer,
don''t worry; printer drivers are available from many
printer manufacturers. For example, one such printer driver is
available from Hewlett-Packard at