PrintToPDF [icon]

PrintToPDF is a shareware Macintosh printer driver that creates PDF files (readable by Adobe Acrobat™ Reader or GhostScript on any platform). You do not need to have the full Acrobat package (as opposed to the Reader) installed for PrintToPDF to work. You can create PDF bookmarks to your section and subsection headings, and URLs will become hot links. PrintToPDF is not as powerful as Acrobat, but it creates simple PDFs for a much lower price ($20).

PrintToPDF has been primarily tested with Mac OS 9, but most of it should work with systems back to 7.0. It does not run in Mac OS X except in applications running in "classic" mode. Some of the Asian language functionality requires a PowerMac and the Text Encoding Converter extension. Of course, since it's shareware, you can find out whether it works well with your system and applications before paying for it. You will need Acrobat Reader 3.0 or later to view the manual and the created PDFs. To view PDFs containing Japanese, Chinese, or Korean text, you'll need the Asian Font Pack for Acrobat Reader. Click the image below to download Acrobat Reader software.

Get Acrobat Reader

I welcome any suggestions or bug reports. I will try to fix any bugs I can reproduce.

See the PrintToPDF FAQ for answers to frequently-asked questions.

Version 2.4.4 changes:

Version 2.4.3 changes:

Known Problem:

If you have installed QuickTime 6, then certain applications (those which use Apple's Unicode text technologies, ATSUI and MLTE) will print rectangular smudges where the text should be. This appears to be a bug in QuickTime 6.

Download Links:

PrintToPDF-2.4.4.sit, 700K

Some folks who have trouble with FTP succeed with an HTTP link.

You'll need StuffIt Expander 5.0 or later to unstuff the archive.

After downloading and testing it, you can buy a license from Kagi.

Localized Versions

If you are interested in localizing PrintToPDF for another language, please read these localization notes.

Extras

I have written a Location Manager module to manage PrintToPDF preference configuration. I'm not a big user of the Location Manager, so I'd have to say it hasn't been tested much.

For those interested in the new watermark feature, here is a sample watermark picture that says Confidential in big gray slanted letters, and another that says Draft. They are set up to be approximately centered on U.S. Letter sized pages. (I had a hard time finding an application that would print rotated text well on a non-PostScript printer. The best that I found was PowerPoint.)

I Don't Do Windows

Many people have e-mailed me to ask if I have, or will have, a Windows version of PrintToPDF. The answer is no. I don't know anything about Windows programming, and if I wanted to learn, writing a printer driver would probably not be an easy place to start.

So, what's a poor Windows user to do? Of course you could buy a Mac, but if you can't afford Acrobat, you can't afford a Mac. There is a freeware solution, though it's more complicated than using PrintToPDF. What you have to do is first choose a PostScript printer driver, and print to a file. Then you use Ghostscript to open the PostScript file and print it to a PDF file. Some other solutions besides Acrobat are listed below. I have not tested these products.

Last modified: 21 January 2006
Copyright ©2002, James W. Walker