Comments on: ‘Print’ anything to a PDF Document in GNU/Linux

By: ^Ronako^

^Ronako^ — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 09:05:21 +0000

Thanks dmom, but I want to keep hundreds pages of report in pdf for reference. But whenever I want to look at some specific information, I always search a word in the report without printing. But I can’t do search the PDF file created by cups-pdf.

By: dmom

dmom — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 23:08:17 +0000

Hey Ronako,

I guess as it’s going through a printer driver, none of that information is being kept ? Why would it, if it’s being printed.

But that’s just a guess.

Pity browsers – that I have seen – don’t have a TO-PDF button, like Open-Office.org. There’s a thought, would opening the web page in OpenOffice work?? You may have to save it to disk first? I am thinking you 1. view the site. 2. save the page to disk. 3. open in open office. 4. edit if you want to remove content or clean it up. 5. hit the PDF button. ???

I have also since seen some formating issues on some sites, as noted by Brandy above. In many cases there is a Print link on the page, which takes you to a more cleanly styled version (not randomly wide, without menus and adverts, etc) that prints fine, on others it’s just tough and some editing or other cleverness is required if you want to get a good print. The via-ps solution is good, but the direct route is still handy to have set up, when it works.

By: ^Ronako^

^Ronako^ — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 05:59:28 +0000

Got the problem as MichaelMunich Said,
PDFs were all bitmaps. Can’t search for text within. Any idea?

By: dmom

dmom — Thu, 20 Sep 2007 22:23:38 +0000

Thank for the comment Brandy.

that’s just the approach I used to take, pity about your formatting issues, I haven’t come across such myself, yet at leat.

Maybe if I do I will try to see if anything can be done about it with the above approach.

By: Brandy Wine

Brandy Wine — Tue, 21 Aug 2007 21:07:37 +0000

Well, this doesn’t work well at all – much better results printing to PS and using ps2pdf to convert. I tried printing pages from a government website that we need to use, and the output from Virtual-PDF was not aligned, the formatting was all out of whack. If we print the exact same page using Postscript/Default printer and print to file and run ps2pdf, the file looks perfect. Don’t know why, but that’s what we’re sticking with.

By: dmom

dmom — Thu, 09 Aug 2007 20:45:31 +0000

Thanks for the feedback. Glad somebody is reading

MichaelMunich, sounds about right to me though as the process involves the printing process, and printers would just need the “bitmaps” for the pages.

I have a vague recollection of trying to do what you want before though, create PDFs in this fashion that had selectable text, clickable hyper-links, etc.
I think it involved just using a ps printer driver again, and each time I printed to it (I didn’t actualy have a printer for the dirver I used) I would check ‘print to file’.

I then edited the resultant “.ps” file in GhostView or something like that, and generated the PDF from there.

If I get time I’ll try to reproduce and post it. If you get it working, feel free to link to your post from here.

By: MichaelMunich

MichaelMunich — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 02:20:35 +0000

thank you – works well for me.
However, after a while, I found that the generated PDFs were all bitmaps. That means, I can’t search for text within these (or can’t copy text from the PDF).

You can verify this by opening the PDF with the Viewer of your choice and using the “Select Tool” (that’s how it’s called in KPDF) to select some text. KPDF then responds with a Select Box titled “image (xxx by yyy pixels).

Is this the same for you?

By: Robin

Robin — Sat, 05 May 2007 19:00:21 +0000

Much to my surprise this does not work for me. I have two printers currently and the third as above is not adding. I go through the steps but the printer does not get created. I am using fiesty.

By: Michael

Michael — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 22:14:15 +0000

Thank you! This was very handy. Running Xubuntu Edgy.