Document Utilities

Document Related Utilities

This page contains applications relating to document production and printing.

This page is provided to guide members of the Gerrards Cross Cumputer Club. Opinions expressed here are those of the contributor of the item. Please notify the contributor if any errors are identified. Page last updated 10 Jun 2011

Libre Office http://www.libreoffice.org/

Libre Office is what is known as a "fork" from Open Office. To all intents and purposes the two suites are currently identical. In fact if you dig down below the surface there already was a fork and Ubuntu and many other Linux distributions used some additional/alternative code from Go-oo but it seems as if Libre Office has incorporated these changes and G0-oo has now be superceded by Libre Office.

Note that Libre Office has a separate download for the Help Files. You do need both. I suspect that the installation process will improve as the team continue to develop the project.

Some of the Background

Open Office was originally sponsored by Sun Microsystems. Sun was bought some time agon by Oracle and from that point there was some uncertainty about the future of Open Office. As Open Office was being developed as open Source a number of (a significant majority) decided to set up a new organisation called the Document Foundation and set about publishing their own version of Open Office. Oracle prevented them from using the Open Office brand and so Libre Office was born. Their first version number matched the Open Office version and the latest version may have overtaken Open Office in terms of supported features. Entry created 10 June 2011 John Steele gxcc.techsupport soroban.co.uk Open Office http://www.openoffice.org/

Open Office is an office suite that rivals Microsoft Office. It can open Office 2003 documents (in particular Word, Excel and PowerPoint). Although it contains a database program it is not compatible with Access

You can also save documents in Microsoft Office formats. I have tried it with many professional documents and not had any issues.

A further feature is that you can save documents directly in PDF format.

There are currently some issues regarding the future of Open Office - see note below and the comments on the Libre Office entry. Following the acquisition of Sun Microsystems by Oracle there has been some uncertainty about what Oracle would want to do with Open Office. They have now decided to transfer the ownership of the brand to the Apache Foundation. It would have seemed more logical to transfer it to the Document Foundation but who can fathom the reasoing behind large organisations! There is possibly some petty reaction to the formation of the Document foundation. Apache Foundation have made this an "incumator product". I think this means that they have not quite decided what to do about it. Which of the two products to choose - Libre Office vs Open office? In my opinion I am inclined to favour Libre Office but if you already have Open Office I would suggest that you wait and see what happens. It may depend on what the developers that stayed with the Open Office fork choose to do. I am guessing that these will be mainly employees of Sun/Oracle. Entry updated 10 June 2011 John Steele gxcc.techsupport soroban.co.uk Foxit (Acrobat Reader Alternative) http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php

Foxit is a small program that works the same as Acrobat Reader but is tiny in comparison.

John Steele gxcc.techsupport soroban.co.uk Bullzip PDF Printer http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php

This program provides a means of creating PDF files by installing a PDF "printer". All you need to do is to print the document to the printer and a PDF document is created.

I have been getting annoyed by the sponsor pages on PDF995 so I explored alternatives. This seemed to be one of the bast. It produces similar size output files to PDF995.

It gives several alternative options for ourput as well as PDF. these include PNG and TIFF. it also alloows the proint quality to be selected as well as more advanced options such as water4mark, background or foreground overlays etc.

During installation the program insatlls an additional program Ghostscript lite which actually does much of the work. Don't be fooled bu the initial download size of 4mbyre, ghostcript is a further 9 Mbytes. Application added 29 December 2009 John Steele gxcc.techsupport soroban.co.uk Free PDF http://www.geocities.com/thompso_m1

This program provides a means of creating PDF files by installing a PDF "printer". All you need to do is to print the document to the printer and a PDF document is created.

Link goes to a documentation page which then gives links to pages containing download instructions for various platforms.

Warning - follow instructions carefully. Download LATEST versions in all cases apart from the first. I found that I needed "fpdfz-95.zip" as"frpdf098f.exe"did not work with Windows XP Note that although this program worked fine I now use PDF995. John Steele gxcc.techsupport soroban.co.uk PDF995 http://www.pdf995.com/

PDF995 is a free PDF "printer" program. I use it now in preference to the Free PDF generator as it installs easier and has more features. In particular I wanted to be able to be able to merge two documents together to be able to produce invoices on company letter headed paper.

There is a downside - the free version of this program will always attempt to access the PDF995 website to display their home page. I can live with this but, strictly speaking, it is adware and not freeware. I am now evaluating BullZip PDF - see entry. John Steele gxcc.techsupport soroban.co.uk Tomahawk PDF+ http://nativewinds.montana.com/software/tomahawk.html

The following is a quotation from their web site.

Tomahawk PDF+ gives you a complete PDF file creation suite right on your computer. Tomahawk can also be used as an advanced editor for rtf, txt, tmd (our own format) and other file formats.

This program no longer freeware and is no longer recommended. It is not a replacement for Acrobat Reader or a PDF printing program. Tony Yates