Tue 21 Nov 2006
Maybe you want to print to PDF. maybe you’ve used programs like: http://www.pdf995.com/
WARNING: THIS DOESN’T YET WORK WITH VISTA!
FYI, a lot of the Windows PDF printers are simply generic PS printers which are connected to ghostscript (which has PS-PDF conversion functionality). http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
In fact, you can make your own windows PDF printer by downloading ghostscript and redmon
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/redmon/index.htm
“The RedMon port monitor redirects a special printer port to a program. … RedMon can be used with any program that accepts data on standard input.Using RedMon you create redirected printer ports. If you connect a Windows printer driver to the redirected printer port, all data sent to the redirected port will be forwarded by RedMon to the standard input of a program. This program is then responsible for processing the data and producing new output.”
I’ve done this and it’s easy to do.
Here are two step-by-step tutorials to creating a free PDFWriter using Ghostscript:
http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSWriter/GSWriter.html
http://kenchiro.tripod.com/howtoPDF.html
November 21st, 2006 at 4:26 pm
Have you also seen PDFCreator? http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/
It is an open source project that provides a PDF printer in Windows.
November 25th, 2006 at 9:15 am
I hadn’t heard of PDFCreator until just moments before your comment. From the link it appears to be a PDF printer? Off the PLUG mailing list they say that there’s a new feature where you can combine multiple documents into one PDF through PDFCreator. That’s pretty useful, actually. I’m going to download it and see for myself. Thanks for the link!
November 30th, 2006 at 11:53 pm
Were does PDFCreator dump the output? Redmon appears to not like Vista much (it puts the filename dialog on the service desktop (new in Vista)) and PDFCreater does nothing. It wouldn’t even install until I threw it under compatibility mode.
December 1st, 2006 at 12:03 am
hey look everyone, it’s David Spigarelli! He’s crossed over into the tech blog. That’s cool.
You’re using Vista? Didn’t it just come out like, um, yesterday or something? talk about rapid adoption…
for the record, I installed pdfcreator on my windows xp and it works like a charm.
as for rolling your own, iirc, i setup a standard printer driver that printed to a ps printer, had it redirect to a file, and then set up redmon to wait for that file to be written before launching ghostscript to convert the ps to a pdf. it’s been a year or two since I’ve play with it. perhaps I’ll grab me a copy of vista and see what I can find out
December 1st, 2006 at 8:42 pm
I’ve been running Vista for months
I’d already rolled my own solution. (1) add a new local PostScript “printer” on the FILE: port. (2) push the output file through GhostScript’s pdfwrite device to generate the PDF. I was hoping either REDMON or PDFCreator would give a one step process as opposed to my two.
Maybe I should just start using the XPS format on Vista.
BTW, I believe I’m your sole Bloglines subscriber for your Tech Blog.
Also, happy 28th birthday tomorrow.
January 20th, 2007 at 2:40 pm
I too had the redmon/ghostscript combo working well under xp.
Having read that redmon doesn’t work under vista, I tried PDFCreator under Vista. I swear I installed it and it worked after I rebooted — it seemed to have difficulty accessing the Temp directory. Anyway, I printed a test pdf to prove it worked. But a day later and it doesn’t work. The spooler component puts a blank message on the Service Desktop and I get no output any more.
Someone earlier wrote about having a two-step solution with the second step being to “push the output file through GhostScript’s pdfwrite device”. Writing a .ps file I can do, but if possible I’d like a little more explicit instructions for this “push” step. Thanks.
January 20th, 2007 at 9:20 pm
If you look into the PDFCreator install directory you’ll see it is comprised of the PDFCreator GUI and the PDFSpooler component. I figured out it’s the PDFSpooler component that appears to be the problem under Vista. It is apparent that PDFCreator also functions as a Port Redirector to PDFSpooler which somehow interfaces with Ghostscript.
Keep in mind that in the Redmon & Ghostscript instructions referenced in the tamu.edu link above, Redmon is the component that doesn’t work under Vista.
When I examined the printer port settings for PDFCreator I discovered that it is also a port redirector (redirecting to its Spooler). While for reasons I don’t understand Vista won’t allow you to change the PDFCreator port configuration, I was able to use Regedit to locate and change the PDFCreator configuration to this: (save this to a .reg file):
———————-
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\ControlSet001\Control\Print\Monitors\PDFCreator\Ports\PDFCreator:]
“Arguments”=”@d:\\gs\\pdfwrite.rsp -sOutputFile=\”%1\” -c save pop -f - ”
“Command”=”D:\\gs\\gs8.54\\bin\\gswin32c.exe”
“Delay”=dword:0000012c
“Description”=”PDFCreator Redirected Port”
“Output”=dword:00000001
————————————–
In short, I changed PDFCreator to redirect to Ghostscript using the configuration settings for Redmon.
***Note 1: Locate the PDFCreator key by searching in *your* registry for “PDFCreator Redirected Port”. You may not be using ControlSet001.
***Note 2: You that you will need to alter the settings in the above .reg file to reference the drive letter and version to which you install ghostscript. The contents of pdfwrite.rsp are explained at the above link.
***Note 3: If you’re not comfortable editing the registry, don’t do this!
The only difference in the way this functions under Vista vs XP is that the filename dialog pops up on the service desktop (new in Vista).
All you’ll have to do when the Vista version of PDFCreator comes out is to uninstall the current version and reinstall the new one. If the install script works properly, the registry keys will be deleted and recreated.
March 21st, 2007 at 1:15 pm
I just came upon info on RedMon and GhostScript when I was driven to find a print to file solution. The one detail I have yet to find is how to have the process generate a unique file name and file it without offering the dialog box to a user. I don’t see any possibilities in the GS documentation I’ve read thus far.
Any ideas out there?
April 16th, 2007 at 4:16 pm
Hmmm, just now happening upon this blog and everyone’s comments, thanks all, they were very helpful. With regards to Vista & PDFCreator 0.9.3, I also had to use compatibilty mode to install and installing locally didn’t work; however, network install did. Just for kicks I tried to install all the printer drivers, resulting in about 10 error messages which I ignored, but now I can use PDFCreator as I did when I ran XP.
April 26th, 2007 at 10:28 pm
For those interested as to why RedMon’s service is broken on Vista, this might give an idea why:
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/system/vista/services.mspx
October 5th, 2007 at 4:09 am
Do you know an equivalent of Redmon for Vista ?
PDF creator don’t work and others (cutepdf, …) have too much of advertising message.
December 8th, 2007 at 12:13 pm
aaarrghhh. Just went to do the classic Redmon + Ghostscript PDF print-to-file solution on a Vista machine, and hit the Redmon-doesn’t-work-here bug. Hopefully this will get fixed over time.
February 7th, 2008 at 8:26 am
Did anyone find a solution to get redmon to work under Vista? Or an equivalent?
February 7th, 2008 at 10:48 am
While not as cheap as Redmon (free?), Office 2007 does have PDF printing ability. I’ve also found the XPS printer built into Vista is a nice way to save digital prints of documents but it isn’t as portable as XPS. Yet. There are currently XPS viewers for XP and Win2k3.
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/default.mspx
http://www.microsoft.com/whdc/xps/viewxps.mspx
February 7th, 2008 at 10:49 am
Sorry, “isn’t as portable as PDF. Yet.”