pdf file

how can u create a pdf file or convert word documents to pdf?

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You have to purchase Adobe Acobat (www.adobe.com) and install it. NOT ADBOE ACROBAT READER -- You must have the full thing. Then, open the document you want to convert. Go to File>Print... And select Acrobat Distiller as the printer.

It's that simple.

PDF is an open format. You don't HAVE to pay to create them. If you have Redhat 8.0 and OpenOffice, you can create PDFs of word documents from there. You may be able to do this via the windows version of OpenOffice, but I have no way to confirm this for you.

I believe Macs have good free PDF options too (though I don't use them, this is what I've heard).

Well, lookie here.

How about the logical converse? Can you cut or copy from a PDF document and paste it to a Word or WordPerfect document?

Many thanks

It depends on the PDF. Have you tried?

Yes, I have. Some of the PDFs are court reporter deposition transcripts. Others are letters (presumably created on some type of word processor) bearing letterhead addresses and handwritten comments. I tried to use ScanSoft's PDF Converter program, but received an error message saying that the program couldn't convert the document to Word because the document lacked a "text layer". Any suggestions?

There are some PDFs that do, indeed, lack a "text layer," they can be locked by the creator to disallow copying, or you may have a sucky PDF reading program. You may be SOL in terms of copying for some PDFs.

I suggest you get "Web publishing with Acrobat PDF" (google for it) if you need the whole scoop. It's a little old, but still mostly relevant.

I manipulate, create and maintain large sets of PDFs for work, and know more about them then I'd like. . . but I very, very rarely use Adobe Acrobat Reader (so I can't help you with that application) to read them. . .usually xpdf suits me fine.

I once had a link to a hack for Reader that makes it ignore copy protect. I never installed it. If anyone's interested, I could likely find it.

The reason I never installed it was that most of the .pdfs I read I found on Gogle, and they offer an HTML translation.