Hackszine.com: Turn your Linux box into a PDF-making machine

Turn your Linux box into a PDF-making machine

With a Linux box and the Common Unix Printing System (CUPS), you can set up a virtual print server that will output all of its jobs to PDF format. Why might this be useful? From the linux.com article:

When you buy stuff online, virtually every site provides a receipt, which you may want later if the order email is lost or if you need to send in a receipt for expense reports. However, you may not want to print all of them out just to keep them around, and Firefox only supports writing to PostScript, rather than PDF.

What's nice is that you can print to your PDF making device from any Windows, Linux or Mac desktop. This provides a mechanism for consolidating all of your receipts and digital paper assets into one place, which ought to come in handy as you pursue the goal of having a paperless office.

Links:

Posted by Jason Striegel | May 9, 2007 06:45 PM
Linux, PDF, Windows | Permalink | Comments (2)

Comments

Newest comments listed first.

Posted by: MagnusDredd on May 10, 2007 at 12:05 PM

Why would you do this from a Mac?

OSX has this ability built into the printing system. OSX's print dialog already provides the option of saving any document to a pdf instead of printing it, or even outputting the document to a fax.

Furthermore if you're set on being able to just hit "Command-P" and then enter, there's a "pdf printer" driver for CUPS under OSX that does this without requiring another machine here:
http://www.codepoetry.net/projects/cups-pdf-for-mosx

Posted by: Jrubins on June 4, 2007 at 8:34 AM

Is there a way to add OCR (optical character recognition) to this? I'm using Acrobat 8 pro, and the only reason I have for using it is the OCR.
Thanks
James