Not everyone has a printer at home and many of you must be printing files at some internet cafe. It helps to get the document converted to PDF before taking it for printing.
Although OpenOffice.org has a export to PDF option it may not be useful always. ex. If you want to print a webpage, you will need to save it, open in OpenOffice.org and then export it to PDF.
At times you may not have OpenOffice.org installed on your system.
Following procedure helps you set up a PDF printer which can be used from print dialogs in any application. (NOTE: Taken from http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/03/23/print-to-pdf-using-cups-pdf/ and modified)
- Install cups-pdf by using: $sudo apt-get install cups-pdf
- Ubuntu 5.10 and older versions only - Edit /etc/cups/cupsd.conf and change the line that says: RunAsUser Yes
to RunAsUser No
- Restart cupsys: $sudo /etc/init.d/cupsys restart
- Add a new printer (System->Administration->Printing) selecting the “Local Printer”->“PDF Printer” option.
- In the next step choose “Generic Printer” and then use the “Postscript Color Printer (Ver 3)” driver. Version may differ depending on your Ubuntu version.
- Leave the driver set to “Standard (suggested)”
- Provide a name for printer, something like PDF_Local_Printer
Now you should be able to print to pdf by selecting the newly setup printer.
The output .pdf files are stored in your “Home” directory in PDF subdirectory.
You can edit /etc/cups/cups-pdf.conf to change different options related to cups-pdf.