Document converter

[richvh]

Does anyone know of a good, low cost (or free!) program for converting Word .doc files and/or Open Office .odt files to PDF files?

[randomperson]

heres a site http://neevia.com/products/ not sure how much it costs, but there is a download thing(which is prob a trail thing), from the looks of it you can get it for 50, if your just puting it on your computer alone, they have a free thing that does files up to 1mb in size too(free one ishttp://convert.neevia.com/)

[Nibble]

Open Office has PDF export functionality built in. Just open any file that Open Office can open (which incudes all MS Office file types) and click File > Export to PDF.

[richvh]

Thanks! Didn't notice that feature. Unfortunately, I'm composing the file in Word, and there seem to be some formatting issues when I import into Open Office, so I can't just import and export without doing some cleanup. (Since Word handles ruby text better than Open Office does, I'll continue to compose there.)

[Justin]

Have you tried this...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

[clay]

I use
http://www.pdf995.com
on one computer but I think it is the one that has pop up ads after you create PDFs (not too annoying though and certainly worth it)

And Cute PDF on another computer - I don't think this has ads at all:
http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp

Both act like print drivers. You 'print' to the PDF maker and it creates on the fly PDFs. And both are totally free.

EDIT: Both work well, but it is hard to control the file size. If compression is important, there may be better makers out there. But they have both worked well for me.

[richvh]

I'll give them a try later, and see how the file sizes compare to what Open Office produces. No big rush on this, I'm a long way from finishiing formatting even the portion of the story that is done.

[clay]

I didn't mean to make it sound like the two I use make HUGE files, but I just can't really control the compression well. (Maybe I can, I just haven't dug into it deep enough)

[Chris Hart]

On my laptop (WinXP SP2), I use PDF4U. It works as a printer driver, so if you can print it, you can create a PDF of it.

On my desktop (Slackware Current) I use Ghostscript, which can convert Postscript and raw text to PDF. If it runs under Linux and can print, it will most likely generate a Postscript file.

[keatonatron]

I like http://www.pdfonline.com/. You upload the document and they convert it and mail it to whatever e-mail address you want. It's 100% free.

I also use CutePDF, but it's pretty basic.