The PDF (Portable Document Format) has been around for years. It was created by Adobe. Visit their site to find the blurb on why PDF is such a great thing.
The problem: creating a PDF using Adobe software will cost.
The full version of Acrobat costs $249 (as of May 2002) for a single
user licence. Don't get me wrong - it's a very good piece of software
that does amazing things. If you have need of all it's features, you
pay the money. Note that Acrobat Reader is always free.
But (Never start a sentence with a conjunction!) if all you want is a
simple PDF, that's expensive.
The answer: find a cheaper way of doing it.
Now there are a few solutions to this, but I'm going to give a very
self-contained version. The specifics I'm going to give are for
WindowsXP (and should work just as well on other versions of
Windows (ME, 9x and 2000), but I expect that it's portable to other
platforms with a minimum of hassle.
Remember that 'Add Printer' wizard you have sitting inside your Printers folder? Run it. You will need to be logged on as an Administrator (or an account capable of adding devices).
We are creating a virtual output device that's capable of handling PostScript documents. Which means Do not run out and buy a printer! It's not going to be a real device - we're faking it.
You will need to install the printer manually. Make certain it's a local printer and do not automatically detect!
When selecting a printer port choose "FILE" as the port. When prompted for the printer manufacturer and model, you can choose anything with the "PS" appendage. For the sake of convenience, I suggest the "HP DeskJet 1600CM/PS" device.
Once the drivers have been installed, I recommend you don't set it as your default printer.
Let it print a Test Page. In the dialog that appears give the file a name. - C:\test.ps or something similar. The .ps is because it's a PostScript file.
At this point you need something to covert the PS file into a PDF. This is where the Free Software movement come into the picture.
GhostScript will probably be familiar to anyone who has dabbled in Linux - it's a PostScript emulator that you can download - fortunately for us there is also a Windows version. So head off to the GhostScript web page and get yourself the latest versions of both GhostScript and GSView.
Back already? Installed everything? Right. Open up that test.ps with GSView. Menus - File | Convert. In the dialog that appears select pdfwrite as the device and 600 as the resolution. Click OK and name your brand-spankers PDF file.
So it doesn't look quite right. OK. There are things you may need to tweak. In the printer settings go for highest quality settings everywhere. Make certain you are downloading native true-type fonts and not just bitmaps, set the Colour Management to sRGB Color Space Profile. Just play around.
If you're here, you've done the hard part. The great thing about this method is that it doesn't care what program your document is created by - as long as it can print, you can create a PDF version.