Creating PDF’s

Steven — Sun, 01 Mar 2009 21:27:36 +0000

A PDF (Portable Document Format) is a format for documents developed by Adobe. It has become the universally accepted format for e-books as they can easily be made and – most importantly they can be read on any computer which has Adobe Reader installed. Most new machines ship with this pre installed but if not its freely available on the Adobe web site.

The only problem with Adobe Reader is that it doesnt allow you to create pdf’s or edit existing pdf’s. If you are interested in selling information products / ebooks of any kind it is essential that you have the facility to both of these things.

One solution is to buy Adobe Acrobat which will perform both functions + much more but I’m guessing most of you won’t want to be paying out $299.

To be honest, whilst Acrobat is an excellent piece of software, you dont really need all of its features for basic e-book editing and you certainly dont need to spend $299. Starting with pdf creation, this can be easily done for free with anumber of freely available applications. The easiest method is to download a ‘pdf printer’. There are a number of these available, some examples are:

You can download any of these for free. When you install them, what happens is that they are installed as a ‘virtual’ printer. So when you have a document ready which you want to make into a pdf e-book (say for example, you copy the text of book from Gutenberg – free online book catalog – into Word and edit it to your requirements) all you do is go to ‘print’ and when your printer dialogue box appears there should be a choice of printers – just choose your pdf printer and your pdf will be created, Job done!

An alternative to this is to download Open Office. If you dont know what this is, its basically a free alternative to Microsoft Office. Its word processor has a pdf button on its toolbar so when you are ready to create your e-book you just click it – easy & free. I believe that the latest release of Open Office (3.0) has a feature which enables you to also EDIT pdf’s. How this works and what features it has I dont know as I haven’t tried it, BUT this is a major step forward as I don’t believe there is a fully functioning totally free pdf editor out there so its definitely worth a try.

Thats all for now, but look out for future posts where I’m going to be talking about much cheaper alternative to Acrobat for pdf editing which can acheive very professional results.

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Creating PDF’s