Is there an open-source alternative to Acrobat?

[Occulus]

A friend of mine needs to create a series of PDF's that will be displayed at a convention, but he's not making enough of them to justify actually buying the Acrobat package. He'll be creating more in the future and needs a package like Acrobat that does many of the same things.

Can anyone in here recommend such a package? I don't create PDFs myself and don't use Acrobat, only the reader, so I guess I'm looking for the most fully-featured application available. Any help would be appreciated :)

[salvorhardin]

1. OpenOffice is able to print to PDF

Make your documents freely available with WRITER's HTML export to the web, or publish in Portable Document Format (.pdf) to guarantee that what you write is what your reader sees.

more...
http://www.openoffice.org/product2/writer.html

[FormerDittoHead]

2. Cutepdfwriter is not opensource but free and no watermarks.

http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp

Their commercial product with the bangs and whistles is $50.
http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/Plus.asp

[trotsky]

7. I have set up CutePDF for a few people.

Works great - the PDF files it makes aren't bloated either. Good, free product.

[hobbit709]

3. WordPerfect

exports to PDF. OpenOffice does too. If all he wants to do is create PDF that's no problem. Acrobat lets you modify PDF files and save the changes but if you're not planning on changing the files the above do just fine.

[qnr]

4. If he has access to Linux, or a live CD like Knoppix, you can create

PDFs easily. Most programs generate .ps files, and then you just run ps2pdf on them (that's just one option, there are actually many ways to do it.) - This isn't meant as a Windows vs. Linux thing, just pointing it out.

[longship]

5. Make any document into a PDF file.

Print it to a PS file.

Use 'ps2pdf' to convert it to PDF.

Not perfect, but it'll do the trick.

LaTeX is good for producing PDF files, if you are versed in TeX.

[alfredo]

6. If he has access to a

Mac, he can convert all of them to PDF by hitting Print, then hit the PDF button and save as a PDF.

Make sure he checks the formatting before saying the job is done.

Sometimes copying the document, then pasting it into Text Edit will take care of that. If it looks good, then do the print pdf thing.