PDF Creation

Recently a great many people I know have been working on creating things to sell in the form of tutorials and e-books in digital format. Quite a few have used Word and are trying to use just a .doc format for selling this idea of theirs…. I’ve e-mailed several and walked several through converting things to PDF format. Adobe Acrobat is NOT the only way to create PDF files. There are services that will convert just about any file you can think of. There are also programs that do this as well. Some are paid others are freeware.

For Word or other MS Office products (yes you can convert Power Point and Excel to PDF!) I use PDF995. This is freeware with no spyware and no ads attached or added to your files. The free version does pop up an ad for upgrading to the paid version but it’s not all that big of a deal nothing attaches itself to your file that you create. How it works is you go to www.pdf995.com and download the files they provide. Follow their installation instructions and the next time you’re in Word and need a PDF you go to file and print and switch to a postscript printer driver (the program knows which one you need and comes with it). It’ll print to file and you save the PDF. You can put anything you want in the document…. photos, links, text, colors, fonts etc. And WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get)! The nice thing about this little add on is that it works with Word 98 or greater…. Even up to 2003 (according to the site…. I run 2000 so do not have first hand knowledge of this).

Other programs I’ve run into with PDF converters are Corel Draw 11 and Open Office (open source version of MS Office). I use Corel to convert all my patterns, books, lines & kits for sale and it works just fine.

Poke around online you’d be surprised at how many free programs there are available for converting various file formats to PDF.

Sue Darby~Owner
www.suestinycostumes.com