PDF file creator?

Hi friends.

I have made a writing in a text.txt file on my EOS KDE with Kate, and I have to print it in a copy shop because I don’t have a printer.

I don’t know how I should send the writing to be printed, I guess in a .pdf file, as I think the .txt file will not be printable.

I use Mozilla firefox to edit and save changes in PDF files, no problem with this. But Mozilla Firefox won’t let me create .pdf files from to put my writing.

I can also try to find a pdf file on google and try to edit it, but it doesn’t seem like a good idea.

Which app to create and edit pdf files do you recommend?

Thanks in advance!

LibreOffice. Just copy and paste the text, save the file, then export as PDF.

Another option is to use pandoc, but LibreOffice is more beginner-friendly. Not that pandoc is difficult.

File > Export As > Export as PDF...

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Did you try to print from Kate? Press CTRL-P and print to a file (PDF). I’m not sure if that is enabled if you don’t already have a printer installed, but it’s worth a try.

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that would depend if CUPS-PDF is installed on the system. Sometimes it can be a dependency so is installed regardless of a printer or not.

@nicknick you can check to see if you have cups-pdf by typing this at the command line
pacman -Q cups-pdf

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Omg, it worked! It pops up a box with several options, you hit the “Print” button and it will create a pdf with the same name in the same path!

I have opened the pdf and everything is perfect, but the color of the letters appears gray, I will try to fix this, nothing serious!

As you said, in Kate, Ctrl+P or File > Print/Export > Print.

That’s great, so I won’t have to download more packages that I’m hardly going to use, thanks again friend!

$ pacman -Q cups-pdf
error: package 'cups-pdf' was not found

Thank you friend. I don’t seem to have this package, but it worked with Kate. Maybe Kate uses another dependency or something.

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Great to hear that Ctl+P now hits your immediate need. But just a suggestion… if you don’t already have LibreOffice installed, you’re likely missing out on one of the best FOSS gems out there. Take a look sometime.

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I agree with @ArchieLinux, LibreOffice is a complete office software suite that I wouldn’t be without.

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You can even edit PDFs in LO Draw. With draw and pdfsam, you can do every useful pdf operation. Unless they’re some government forms, they made Adobe Acrobat standard in Romania.

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It works perfectly but I still have the small problem that, when creating the pdf, the letters are grayed out:

I have tried changing the print options from “color” to “gray”, but the letters still appear gray.

I have searched for information, and I have read that it is a bug in KDE BREEZE when printing to pdf, the letters change to gray.

Do you think it is a visual bug, and when I go to the copy shop, it will print black instead of gray?

Yes, I think it’s a good idea, I think I should try libreoffice.

I found these 2 packages, although I don’t know if it is the official Arch version or if these are not the right packages:

https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/libreoffice-still/
https://archlinux.org/packages/extra/x86_64/libreoffice-fresh/

The “fresh” version is the more current release with newest features/fixes … but may have glitches not fully identified yet. My sense is that it is much more scrubbed than a typical “beta” release of software given how many eyes and hands are on it.

The “still” version is more like the LTS (long term stable) in the kernel world.

Frankly, I’ve always kept my yay updates focused on keeping up with the “fresh” version and have never encountered any issues whatsoever.

Hate to say the name that shall not be said, but libreoffice is essentially a replacement in the linux world for the entire Microsoft :tm: Office :registered: suite (word, excel, db, powerpoint) . You can even load and save libreoffice files in MS formats of various types so you’ll be interoperable with the ludites on Windows. :wink:

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You can avoid such bugs or uncertainties by using an app that was actually made for stuff like this. → LibreOffice

Everything that @ArchieLinux said is very much accurate, and it only takes up 412 MB of space.

There’s also AbiWord, which is just a word app, but I don’t know if it has this function.

And if space is your concern, then you can learn to convert most text-based files on the command line by using Pandoc. It’s probably less than 10 MB with all its dependencies combined.

pandoc input.txt -o output.pdf

That simple.

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Hello,

There’s a CLI application called text2pdf in the AUR.

http://www.eprg.org/pdfcorner/text2pdf/help.php

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Sorry for taking so long to answer friends!

I finally took all your advice and installed libreoffice-fresh, the text color was fixed and printed correctly!

I don’t think I’ll be using it again for a long time, but I’m sure I’ll find this suite of tools helpful in the future!

Also LibreOffice seems to be better than OpenOffice, although I think both are open source, which is great that there are several alternatives.

Thanks again to all of you for your help friends!

You’re welcome.

LibreOffice was forked from OpenOffice and improved quite a bit.

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