The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a popular way to distribute and exchange documents. And with good reason: PDF files retain all the formatting -- fonts, layout, graphics, and more -- of the original document. In Windows and on the MacOS, Adobe Acrobat is the most popular software for creating PDFs, but there's no version of Acrobat for Linux.

But that doesn't mean you can't create PDFs in Linux. Geeky and techie users of Linux know literally dozens of ways to create PDFs. But what about the rest of us? There are some excellent Linux alternatives to Acrobat available, and they're easy to use and master.

About PDFs

So, what are PDFs? They're snapshots of documents that you create in a word processor, desktop publishing application, or similar software. PDFs retain all the formatting, fonts, layout, graphics, and more,of the original document. You can create PDFs directly, or by first creating a Postscript file and then converting that file to PDF. Postscript is a programming language that describes how a printer or typesetter should interpret the look of a printed page,the positioning of text and graphics, the fonts used, and so on. You can create Postscript files with any number of specialized applications, or by just printing to a file from within your favorite word processor.

ps2pdf

ps2pdf is a script that comes bundled with the popular Ghostscript software that's used to interpret and manipulate Postscript files. ps2pdf is a command-line tool that runs a Postscript file through Ghostscript and produces a PDF.

Ghostscript comes with most distributions of Linux. To find out whether or not you have Ghostscript and ps2pdf installed, type either ps2pdf or ps2pdfwr at the command line. To use ps2pdf, type the command ps2pdf, followed by the name of the Postscript file that you want to convert, like this:

ps2pdf myFile.ps

The PDFs that are produced by ps2pdf vary in quality from production-level to fuzzy. The quality of the output really depends on the source Postscript file and the fonts you use. You can improve the quality of the resulting PDFs by using one of the many ps2pdf options. You can use the options to embed fonts, compress your PDFs to make them smaller, or specify the resolution that determines the clarity of the PDF by setting the number of dots per inch at which the file is displayed.

There are about 75 options, so explaining them all in this article is impossible. For more information on these options, check the documentation for Ghostscript.