writing pdfs

[Andrea Venturoli]

** Reply to note from "William O'Higgins" <william.ohiggins at utoronto.ca> Fri, 10 Oct 2003 08:31:41 -0400


> I have grown tired of using MS Word as my standard document output 
> format.  I haven't gotten OpenOffice to work under FreeBSD (and it isn't 
> my favourite tool by a long shot) and I am most happy generating text in 
> vi.  PDF is eminently portable, and I think that it would suit my 
> purposes nicely. 
>    
> I had some thoughts about generating PDFs, but I was hoping for advice 
> about which tools to use.  Should I just learn how to mark up a text 
> page manually (I write HTML almost as quickly as plain text)?  Should I 
> learn TeX or some variant and translate it?  I hear that PHP has some 
> excellent PDF-generation tools; should I write up a command-line 
> interpreter myself?  Any suggestions would be appreciated. 
>  
> I did a bit of searching, but I didn't find any real *advice* on what 
> process to use, and most of the tools that I found are for viewing PDFs, 
> not writing them.

I use a virtual printer calling ghostscript to let my users output a pdf file from any program that can print. Any
postscript driver should work.
Basically they prin from their favourite program to a samba shared printer which outputs a pdf file in their home dir.
Some kinks but it does its job.
If you are a local user you will not need samba, but the principle can be almost the same: practically everything can
output postscript.

 bye
        av.