The Portable Document Format developed by Adobe – essentially Encapsulated PostScript with a few indexing,crypto and security features thrown in.
Resources:
| Date | Link | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Jul 9 | epub2pdf | A Java tool to output EPUB files to PDF. |
| May 2 | Tabbloid | An interesting service that takes RSS feeds and e-mails you a PDF magazine. |
| Older | PDFTools | for Windows, allows for combining and manipulating multiple files. |
| CutePDF | works properly under Terminal Services, Citrix, etc. (my current choice) | |
| Primo PDF | doesn’t work properly under Terminal Services for some reason | |
| PDF Creator | ||
| Ghostscript | The one that started it all | |
| RedMon | The ancient Windows print redirector | |
| PrinceXML | converts XHTML into hyperlinked PDF documents | |
| Foxit PDF Viewer | very fast, very small, somewhat buggy image display and font rendering. Lets you remove all toolbars, advertising, etc. | |
| Multivalent PDF Tools | written in Java | |
| FPDF | a PHP class to generate PDFs (Ruby port) |
Mac OS X uses Display PostScript (part of its NeXT heritage), so you don’t need anything to view or create PDFs in it (just save the Print Preview results to a file).
Samba Ghostscript Printer:
[smbpdf] comment = PDF Generator path = /var/spool/samba printable = Yes print command = gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -q - \ sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=%H/%s.pdf; rm %s
Compression
Here’s a plugin for PDF compression that I used under Leopard.
Removing Passwords
The qpdf utility (some assembly required) can do it cleanly like so:
qpdf—password=foobar—decrypt orig.pdf new.pdf