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.

I have used Scribus in the past, but I was not entirely satisfied with it.

What do you use to make PDFs that is intuitive and does not have a steep learning curve?

[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.

[tmaly → shanecleveland]

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

[codegladiator]

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

[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.

[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.

[AnimalMuppet → lumberjack]

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

[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.

[sethammons]

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

[tmaly → sethammons]

But I am looking for something to handle the layout

[vasili111]

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