At 10:29 25/01/01 +0000, Tom Mathews wrote:
>This issue cropped up with us a little while ago, but in a slightly different
>context.
>We have documents that are created using Word (PC users) and FrameMaker (die
>hard Unix users that do not want anyone else to be able to edit their work
>without first taking a degree in pontlessness). All of these documents need to
>be accessed by everyone over the intranet using a variety of O/S's and
>browsers.
>The solution - a 'pdf printer' function. You can either buy acrobat /
>distiller
>or some such, or if you're feeling energetic you can write your own, but don't
>try this lightly (I wrote a PostScript printer driver from scratch in a former
>life and spent about a year writing 20,000 lines of C code). Whatever you
>choose, just run this whenever a document is uploaded and then create a
>link to
>the pdf file (and if you don't want to edit it again, you can also delete the
>original at this point). I've not yet found a browser or OS that you can't get
>a decent pdf reader working with, as opposed to the word reader that NetScape
>kindly crashes everytime that you try and use it (and don't think that you
>will
>get away with telling people to download the minute either - NetScape has a
>nasty habbit of changing all the carriage returns into line feeds when you
>donwload from a Unix hosted site to a PC, which means that you can't use the
>doc when you get it onto your PC)
>
>Minutes are one of the applications that we use this technique for - the group
>all write them in Word and then throw them at the upload filter which
>automatically creates the pdf and a link to this.
Hi Tom,
I was wondering what sort of solution you (and other list members) use for
the Word to PDF conversion? I've been looking at adding this as an extra
feature for our clients (clubs) to upload their monthly newsletters for
members to download/read. There's no way I'm going to allow them to post
Word documents (problems with fonts, and more importantly if anyone spreads
a Doc with a macro virus in it, I'll be the one who personally gets
blamed), and unfortunately getting people to save as a different format
from Word isn't much of an option either (they use graphics for headlines,
and in some cases it's too hard to explain to them how to save as a
different file format).
Obviously Acrobat Distiller seems to be the way to go, although all the
pages on the Adobe site mention using some form of GUI-based conversion
(usually for dragging and dropping files, or using it from within Word),
plus then I could run into expensive issues with licensing (not really
something I'd look forward to since this wouldn't create a single cent in
revenue for us).
Any suggestions or examples of how people in here are doing such
conversions would be greatly appreciated :)
Thanks,
Angus.
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