PDF creation on PPC

[divajess]

I have read that PrintCE SDK is working on document-to-PDF creation for a future release. It would be invaluable to me (and countless others, I am sure) to be able to create PDF documents from, say, full .doc files in Textmaker. I do quite a bit of public relations work and I am often creating PDFs for electronic press kits. It would be awesome to do this on the road. Does anyone know of any utility that allows this?

[Jason Dunn]

I've never encountered an application that would allow this - I agree it would be cool though. :-)

[divajess]

Figures that I'd be ahead of my time! :) Ahh well, it can't be too far away.

[Brad Adrian]

Just as an aside, keep your eyes on what Cerience has been doing with their Repligo format. Their conversion tools only work on the desktop, too, but the resulting file sizes are much smaller than PDF. I love using Repligo and hope that its format becomes more widely used.

[divajess]

I absolutely adore Repligo...I use it ALL the time to convert PDFs and websites for my own personal use. But unfortunately, my freelance employers all want one universal file format, and Repligo isn't there yet. :(

[CEGiven]

I'm demo-ing RepliGo since I'm frustrated with Adobe Acrobat. I have some very complex documents that contain Greek text, diagrams, tables, etc. They take forever to process to optimized PDFs for the PPC (sometimes more than an hour). It was a pain to get tagging turned on so they would reflow. Tagging bloated the PDF and defeated the optimization. Also, embedded fonts are a pain with Adobe (and they get removed when you optimize). Also, optimizing graphics is a real pain, and Acrobat will often refuse to optimize them (I wanted 72dpi grayscale since the PPC doesn't need a higher dpi). And don't even get me started about changing page size!

All-in-all Acrobat is a very cryptic program, and tweaking takes an expert (I'm using the latest version, BTW). The online knowledge-base hasn't been very helpful. I'm NOT a computer newbie, and yet I find anything but basic PDF's a pain.

What I do like is the ability to password protect a PDF, restrict printing or copy-and-paste, and its ubiquity.

RepliGo was immediately useful for PPC documents. The optimized file sizes were so amazing I thought it had died before finishing, the process also worked quickly, the reader also opened files quickly, didn't choke on the Greek fonts, and I LOVE the landscape option (especially since HP isn't going to release WM2003SE for the current iPAQ's -- :evil: ).

But, it's not perfect. Both Acrobat and RepliGo have trouble with reflow mode when text is in a table (although in a second test, RepliGo did better -- same document: I wonder what happend the first time? :? ). I'm still investigating and comparing, but it's looking better all the time. It's definitely going on the wishlist for purchase.