PrintToPDF

PrintToPDF is a classic 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 free.

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. 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.

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

Version 2.4.5 changes:

Removed the need to register.

Version 2.4.4 changes:

Fixed a bug that caused rectangles to be missing from PDFs made in Reunion.
Fixed a bug that caused misaligned lines in Virtual Composer.

Version 2.4.3 changes:

Fixed a bug with the size of the active rectangle for URL links when the resolution was not 72.
Underlined rotated text now has the underline in the right place.
Previously, some Carbon applications thought they should print 256 copies. Now it should always be 1 copy.
If PrintToPDF presents a Save dialog, and you say you want to replace an existing file, but the old file can't be deleted for some reason, then the Save dialog appears again.

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 Link:

PrintToPDF-2.4.5.sit, 652K

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

Localized Versions

Jean-Pierre Kuypers has begun providing French translations of PrintToPDF. (Note: unlike many FTP servers, this one requires that you use a real e-mail address as password when you log in anonymously.)
Matthias Merzbacher provides a German translation.
Vella Bruno provides an Italian localization. Enrico Sanna has translated the manual into Italian.
Roberto Rodríguez Illanes provides a Spanish localization.
Pautha and Kazuyuki Shimatani have collaborated on a Japanese localization of PrintToPDF and its documentation.
Paulo Nascimento has localized PrintToPDF for Portuguese.

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. There are quite a few similar products for Windows, but I don't know enough to recommend one.