From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Oct 10 05:46:53 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id DB2D316A4B3 for ; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 05:46:53 -0700 (PDT) Received: from smtp2.libero.it (smtp2.libero.it [193.70.192.52]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id E64ED43FAF for ; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 05:46:52 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from ml.ventu@flashnet.it) Received: from soth.ventu (151.42.126.222) by smtp2.libero.it (7.0.020-DD01) id 3F6F0DA9006AA285 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 14:47:29 +0200 Received: from mailer (xanatar.ventu [10.1.2.6]) by soth.ventu (8.12.6p3/8.12.6) with SMTP id h9ACkoj5011765 for ; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 14:46:50 +0200 (CEST) (envelope-from ml.ventu@flashnet.it) Message-Id: <200310101246.h9ACkoj5011765@soth.ventu> To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Priority: Normal X-Mailer: Post Road Mailer for OS/2 (Green Edition Ver 3.0) Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 14:46:50 EST From: Andrea Venturoli Subject: writing pdfs X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list Reply-To: Andrea Venturoli List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 12:46:54 -0000 ** Reply to note from "William O'Higgins" 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.