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Showing posts from November, 2012

Creating a Free PDF Printer in Windows 7 using Ghostscript and Redmon that is one tenth the size of a full Adobe install

Introduction ( download a pdf of this article with screenshots here ) Adobe PDF's are the lingua franca of online document distribution and while the Adobe Acrobat Professional software is great, it is rather expensive for students, teachers, or anyone who wants to save $115-$180.  The steps described below will give you a completely free working PDF printer but it is important to point out that this won't let you create forms, binders, or any of the advanced Acrobat features that come in the commercial package.  It will however let you render documents to a PDF exactly like you would see on your printer and that is 80-90% of what most people need. In addition, the total install will only occupy ~40MB on your computer, which is approximately one tenth the size of the smallest Acrobat Professional install (and it doesn't require a reboot). At a very high level we are going to do 3 things: Create a virtual printer port that works just like a USB cable or network