
Ask HN: Free program for making polished PDFs? - tmaly
I was looking for a free or nearly free program that can make polished PDFs and will run on a macbook.<p>I have used Scribus in the past, but I was not entirely satisfied with it.<p>What do you use to make PDFs that is intuitive  and does not have a steep learning curve?
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shanecleveland
My typical process is to start in Mac's Pages app, using the Page Layout mode
(Edit > Convert to Page Layout before doing anything). Very intuitive and a
lot of control over placing elements on the page. Much better than using Word
and without the major expense of more sophisticated/advance layout software.

Then, as others have suggested, Print > Save as PDF.

If I require the PDF to have editable fields, I then use Adobe Acrobat Pro.
Fairly easy for simple use cases. Not sure of the cost on that.

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tmaly
I have not used Page Layout, but I think this is exactly the solution I was
looking for. Thank you

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codegladiator
I think you can replace "PDF" in your question with "document" and use
anything (latex/word/libre) then just print it as pdf.

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ecesena
I went through many iterations of this very same issue, and note that I have
pretty deep experience with latex and other publishing tools.

At the end of the day, now I'm optimizing for simplicity. Personally I use
Google docs, but open office would be exactly the same. You just print as PDF
when you need the PDF -- and with Google docs typically you can just share the
link in view only mode, you don't even need the PDF.

The reason for me is small edits. With Gdocs I can do any small change even on
my phone, and most importantly I can share the file with anyone and they can
make edits for me, if needed.

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lumberjack
Latex is not that hard to learn. The very basics you can learn in under 20
minutes. Then grab a template from openlatex or sharelatex and don't mess with
it. And if something doesn't work out, ask on tex.stackexchange.

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AnimalMuppet
Use Lyx. It's a wrapper around Latex (or frontend for it) that makes it much
easier to use.

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sasaf5
Not sure exactly what you mean by "make PDF". In my flow I sometimes use
Inkscape to save something as PDF, or PDF Latex to generate documents. I hope
it helps you.

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sethammons
On mac, docs can print to PDF. What kind of work do you need to turn into a
PDF?

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tmaly
But I am looking for something to handle the layout

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vasili111
You can create document in LibreWriter and export it as pdf.

