From owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Fri Oct 10 06:07:32 2003 Return-Path: Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2BD9A16A4B3 for ; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 06:07:32 -0700 (PDT) Received: from smtp.hispeed.ch (mxout.hispeed.ch [62.2.95.247]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 9959B43FAF for ; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 06:07:30 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from locus@stable.ch) Received: from stable.ch (dclient80-218-246-37.hispeed.ch [80.218.246.37]) h9AD7PrR008453 (version=TLSv1/SSLv3 cipher=EDH-RSA-DES-CBC3-SHA bits=168 verify=NO) for ; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 15:07:28 +0200 Received: from locus by stable.ch with local (Exim 3.33 #1) id 1A7wzQ-000Luh-00 for freebsd-questions@freebsd.org; Fri, 10 Oct 2003 15:07:28 +0200 Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 15:07:28 +0200 From: Thomas Spreng To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Message-ID: <20031010130727.GA83228@rock.stable.ch> Mail-Followup-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org References: <20031010123141.GA1925@sillyrabbi.dyndns.org> Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Disposition: inline In-Reply-To: <20031010123141.GA1925@sillyrabbi.dyndns.org> User-Agent: Mutt/1.4i Sender: locus Subject: Re: writing pdfs X-BeenThere: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.1 Precedence: list List-Id: User questions List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , X-List-Received-Date: Fri, 10 Oct 2003 13:07:32 -0000 On Fri, Oct 10, 2003 at 08:31:41AM -0400, William O'Higgins wrote: > I have grown tired of using MS Word as my standard document output > format. I haven't gotten OpenOffice to work under FreeBSD (and it isn't > my favourite tool by a long shot) and I am most happy generating text in > vi. PDF is eminently portable, and I think that it would suit my > purposes nicely. > > I had some thoughts about generating PDFs, but I was hoping for advice > about which tools to use. Should I just learn how to mark up a text > page manually (I write HTML almost as quickly as plain text)? Should I > learn TeX or some variant and translate it? I hear that PHP has some > excellent PDF-generation tools; should I write up a command-line > interpreter myself? Any suggestions would be appreciated. I'd suggest you take a look at TeX (especially LaTeX). While it might take some time to learn it will allow to output your data in various formats like html, pdf, ps, text and so on. I am generating my pdf documents with 'pdflatex' from tex sources as well. I'd recommend the following ports for writing latex docs: - teTeX - latex2e There's an excellent latex2e introduction from Tobias Oettiker which can be downloaded from http://people.ee.ethz.ch/~oetiker/lshort/ (filename: lshort.pdf). If you dont like writing latex sources you can try 'lyx' which is a WYSIWYG latex editor. > I did a bit of searching, but I didn't find any real *advice* on what > process to use, and most of the tools that I found are for viewing PDFs, > not writing them. googling on latex and pdf should give you more than enough to read :). Hope that helps cheers, tom