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Old 01-15-2010, 02:55 PM   #11
frabjous
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frabjous can solve quadratic equations while standing on his or her head reciting poetry in iambic pentameterfrabjous can solve quadratic equations while standing on his or her head reciting poetry in iambic pentameterfrabjous can solve quadratic equations while standing on his or her head reciting poetry in iambic pentameterfrabjous can solve quadratic equations while standing on his or her head reciting poetry in iambic pentameterfrabjous can solve quadratic equations while standing on his or her head reciting poetry in iambic pentameterfrabjous can solve quadratic equations while standing on his or her head reciting poetry in iambic pentameterfrabjous can solve quadratic equations while standing on his or her head reciting poetry in iambic pentameterfrabjous can solve quadratic equations while standing on his or her head reciting poetry in iambic pentameterfrabjous can solve quadratic equations while standing on his or her head reciting poetry in iambic pentameterfrabjous can solve quadratic equations while standing on his or her head reciting poetry in iambic pentameterfrabjous can solve quadratic equations while standing on his or her head reciting poetry in iambic pentameter
 
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Join Date: Feb 2009
Location: Amherst, Massachusetts, USA
Device: Sony PRS-505
It really flabbergasts me what people are willing to pay for.

If you want a virtual printer that allows you to print-to-pdf, there's a completely free (and I mean free, not limited shareware or nagware), completely open source option called pdfcreator:
http://pdfforge.org/
(Linux users have other options, including cupspdf, etc.)

As noted, you can export directly to PDF in any recent version of Word, or in the free and open source OpenOffice.

Converting "back" from PDF to Word does not work well with any tool I've tried, but calibre is probably as good as most options.

But really... why save your documents in a proprietary format like Word, making you reliant on Microsoft? Do you really want to set yourself up for a lifetime of paying for their upgrades... when their product is not really all that good? Use some kind of open format.

And if you want really nice typography, I highly recommend that you dump all word processors completely, and switch to something like LaTeX.
"The Beauty of LaTeX"

Quote:
However, there is the 'PDF isn't an ideal ebook format' point to consider, too. It's good for PCs, not very good for ebook reader devices.
PDF is in my opinion far and away the best ebook format, so long as the PDF was actually made for your device. PDF's bad reputation comes from people trying to read PDFs that were not made for their devices. There is no way to get decent typography like kerning, ligatures, end of line hyphenation, full font choice, vector graphics, etc., with any other format.

Last edited by frabjous; 01-15-2010 at 02:59 PM.
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