Yet Another Cycling Forum
General Category => The Knowledge => Ctrl-Alt-Del => Topic started by: fruitcake on 21 March, 2023, 01:04:02 pm
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Looking for a lightweight program that will install in Windows to enable me to print to PDF. The program would be available as a printer in WindowsXP 32-bit to allow export of any file as PDF. It just needs to do this, nothing more. It would be installable via a .exe file and wouldn't need an internet connection. This is not an internet connected computer.
Any recommendations?
Thanks
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I vaguely recall having used CutePDF back in the day, though I'd need something without adware / browser toolbars / bundled crap.
Free open source preferred as it's more likely to be free from crapware etc.
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I've used Bullzip in the distant past, can't remember too much about it other than it was free and seemed to work.
Still available to download and works in 32-bit XP I think.
https://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php
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That should work. Cheers.
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I'm scratching my memory as when we were on XP at work there was a PDF printer driver installed
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I'm scratching my memory as when we were on XP at work there was a PDF printer driver installed
W10 has a print to PDF option built in.Whether it fulfills the lightweight option specified in the OP is unknown.
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The requirement spec said Windows XP 32-Bit
I think we had CutePDF, so nae use.
There was the XPS driver but that doesn't produce PDF IIRC
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I have previously used doPDF, it was OK. Seems the latest version doesn't support XP, but older versions do. And not too much bundled crap. https://www.dopdf.com/previous-versions.html
Or for free/open source, ClawPDF looks interesting, not tried it myself. https://github.com/clawsoftware/clawPDF
Or if its Word/Excel files, easier just to open in LibreOffice, and export from there?
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The requirement spec said Windows XP 32-Bit
So it did. Ignore me.
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A bodge I haven't needed since my days as a penniless student oaf is to print to postscript (pick a driver for a proper postscript printer, and tell it the port is a file IIRC), and convert that to whatever on a proper computer.
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A bodge I haven't needed since my days as a penniless student oaf is to print to postscript (pick a driver for a proper postscript printer, and tell it the port is a file IIRC), and convert that to whatever on a proper computer.
That's pretty much what bullzip does, as best I remember.
It uses Ghostscript behind the scenes to do the heavy lifting, converting postscript to PDF.
Of course, I may be talking total bollocks, it's an old memory, and I CBA to research it now.
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Windows XPS Printer Driver
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/win32/printdocs/microsoft-xps-document-writer
Adobes XPS to PDF solution however is to open the XPS is EXPS viewer then use the windows PDF printer driver
https://www.adobe.com/acrobat/hub/how-to/steps-to-convert-xps-to-pdf
So.... erm... that doesn't help you much
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I've used Bullzip in the distant past, can't remember too much about it other than it was free and seemed to work.
Still available to download and works in 32-bit XP I think.
https://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php
+1 for Bullzip
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I used to use PDFCreator, an open source program. Website is:
https://www.pdfforge.org/pdfcreator/download