Ever find yourself needing to convert a Word document into PDF (Portable Document Format)? Adobe Acrobat, the program usually used to create PDF documents, is fairly expensive, so you may be interested in some cheaper or even free alternatives:
The free OpenOffice.org software is made specifically to work with Microsoft Word documents, and it allows you to save documents in PDF:
http://www.openoffice.org
PDF995 allows you to print as a PDF document from inside Microsoft Word. The program works well, but the free version does insist on displaying ads unless you pay the reasonable price to make it stop:
http://www.pdf995.com/
You can use the free Ghostscript program to create PDF files:
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
And you'll find an excellent tutorial on how to do so here:
http://tinyurl.com/ma5h
About a month ago, PC Magazine featured an article titled PDFing Cheap that reviewed a dozen alternatives to Adobe Acrobat for creating PDFs:
http://tinyurl.com/ma1v
Need other options? You'll find a bunch of Web sites that will convert Word documents to PDF. Just go to Google.com and search for "convert word to pdf free."
Finally, if you have a Macintosh running OS X, you'll find that the operating system itself includes the ability to create a PDF document through the print dialog box.
_________________________________________
READERS WRITE
After reading last week's article "Quote, Unquote," LeAnne Baird wrote:
I had to smile at the subject of this issue. I have a trick that wasn't my discovery, but I've passed it on to a lot of writers. To get a quotation mark to go the right way, type two of them in a row, then delete the first one. The second one stays as is, going the right direction. This is a slick workaround for people who remain unconvinced of the practicality of shortcut keys.
Derek Halvorson sent this useful information and important warning:
You've suggested in your latest update that Microsoft's use of CTRL+' then ' (or SHIFT+') for closing quotation marks is inconsistent, but it is actually completely consistent with their scheme for accented characters. You can add an accent aigu to any vowel by typing CTRL+' before typing the vowel. So, you only have to remember that, any time you want a superscript accent that is slanted upwards from left to right, you need only key CTRL+' first. If one follows your suggestion and makes CTRL+' the shortcut key for a closing single quotation mark, then one loses the keyboard shortcuts for accented vowels. In this case it seems that there may be some sort of method to the Microsoft madness.
Responding to the article "Style by Microsoft," Linda Gray wrote:
I get rid of those hyperlinked URLs and e-mail addresses by pressing Ctrl+Shift+F9 to unlink field codes, although your Editor's ToolKit uses a different key combo, I believe. The publishing company I work for most often, Sage Publications, doesn't want any field codes in the Word files I send to them, so as part of my final check (and usually before that because they're a pain to work around), I press Ctrl+A to select the whole file and then Ctrl+Shift+F9 to unlink the field codes, which turns all those URLs and e-mail addresses into regular type without being linked to anything. It won't take care of any URL or e-mail address that's been underlined, but that's also easily changed by selecting the whole file and pressing Ctrl+U -- unless the file has text that needs to be underlined, which doesn't happen often in the work I do.
Many thanks to all for their comments.
_________________________________________
RESOURCES
Planet PDF is the place to go for all things PDF:
http://www.planetpdf.com
