PDF and other tragicomical histories

Today I had the unlucky task of creating a PDF from a Word document we wrote.
In fact, I did not think the thing would have gotten tricky (ah, how naive!). Word 2007 has a nice "save to PDF" menu item and I thought I could use that to solve my problem. Luckily enough, I double checked the generated PDF on the Mac. And, apparently, all the bold fonts were substituted with another font. I already mentioned this in a post earlier today.

This is completely illogical since the font was Times New Roman and I have Word on the Mac as well, which would install a lot of additional fonts, even if TNR was not that standard. So I searched for a Windows PDF creator (which, by the way both OS X and Linux-based desktop programs have). I found a bunch of them, some commercial, some free, some open source. My choice was PDFCreator.

Some reasons are: i) it is free as in free beer, ii) it is free as in free speech, iii) had no ads, iv) is based on the same softwares I happily used with Linux. Of course, reason i) was paramount: I had no intention to buy a stinking PDF creator for Windows unless it is absolutely necessary (which may be). The other three reasons have to be considered together: I searched google for suggestions, but I had no clue on which one was supposed to be better.

Usually the only problem with open source software is lack of support/user friendliness. However, that was not the case of PDFCreator. Unfortunately, for reasons beyond my comprehension, the generated pdf completely screws[0] a TIFF picture I put in the document. The same picture is perfectly fine in the PDF generated with word built-in generator. I tried to include in word a PDF, but that did not work either (the PDF was linked, but not visible -- nor printable --). Amazingly, Word for Mac is capable of using PDF image files, IIRC.

Perhaps, I should have tried more generators. I went home, opened Word for Mac, double checked that the formatting was fine (which was not, but I could fix it in little time) and simply printed to PDF. The PDF is perfect. This goes under: how to completely waste a Monday morning.

Footnotes

[0] This is a technical term, essentially it looked like it had low resolution