Print2eDoc
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Home » Newsletter » October 2006

By Shivaranjini M. & Avinash Shrigani

Quoting from our previous article, here is a short introduction for our Print2eDoc application.

Gnostice Print2eDoc is a document conversion software that is installed as a "printer" on PCs running on Windows™ operating systems.

Acting as a software printer, Print2eDoc can take printer output from Windows applications and create files in formats, such as PDF, BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and TIFF.

In this article, you will learn about steps to convert documents using Print2eDoc. In addition, you will learn to use Print2eDoc's Microsoft^® Office^® Add-ins and Document Creation Profiles.

Three Steps To Document Conversion Nirvana

• Step 1: The first step in converting a document using Print2eDoc is pretty simple. It is quite the same as when trying to print a document using a hardware printer. Just invoke the print command from the application that you typically use to create or display or print the document.

  For example, if you want to convert a Microsoft^® Word^® document, you will need to select the Print... command from the File menu.

  

• Step 2: In the printer setup dialog box that is displayed, you will need to select Gnostice Print2eDoc as your printer for the print job.

  In our example, Step 1 would have displayed Microsoft Word's Print dialog box. You can now select Gnostice Print2eDoc as the required printer in the Name list box in the Printer section.

  

• Step 3: After Gnostice Print2eDoc is selected as the printer, you can go ahead and send the document for conversion. This brings up a dialog box where you can specify the format to which you need to convert the document.

  Continuing with our Microsoft Word example, you need to click the OK button on the Print dialog box to invoke a subsequent Save As dialog box. This dialog box basically allows you to specify a name and more importantly the required format in which the output file is to be created.

  

Document Conversion Using Optional Microsoft Office Add-ins

Print2eDoc provides seamless integration with Microsoft's Word™, Excel™ and PowerPoint™ applications. During installation, you can optionally install Print2eDoc's Microsoft Office Add-ins. If you choose to install the Add-ins, the aforementioned Microsoft Office products will sport a new Gnostice Print2eDoc drop-down menu and a toolbar button for single-click generation of electronic documents.

From this menu, you can directly invoke Print2eDoc. By selecting Create File, you can skip to Step 3 mentioned above. By selecting Settings, you can invoke the relevant Microsoft Office application add-in settings dialog box. Here, you can specify additional information including Office Document properties such as title, author, keywords, etc., which are not typically sent to the printer with the print command. These settings are tailor-made for conversion to PDF format.

Microsoft Word Add-in: In Microsoft Word, the Add-in will allow you the choice of converting headings and bookmarks (including hidden bookmarks) in a document to bookmarks in the output PDF file. You can also convert hyperlinks, table of contents, footnotes and endnotes to PDF links.

Microsoft PowerPoint Add-in (See screenshot): In Microsoft PowerPoint, you can choose to convert outlines and text to PDF bookmarks. Presentation hyperlinks can be converted to PDF links.

Microsoft Excel Add-in (See screenshot): In Microsoft Excel, you can choose to export worksheet names as PDF bookmarks. You also have the option of printing either the entire workbook or just the active worksheet (the one you are currently working on).

Document Creation Profiles

Print2eDoc's features do not end with Microsoft Office Add-ins. Print2eDoc's real strengths are tucked away in a set of options available under an Advanced Document Creation Properties dialog box.

To invoke this box, begin by selecting the Properties button in the Print dialog box (see Step 2). This invokes a Document Properties dialog box (see screenshot). Alternatively, right-click on Gnostice Print2eDoc from the Printers folder of Windows and select Printing Preferences option from the context menu. In the Document Properties dialog box, select the Properties button in the Document Creation Profiles section to invoke the Advanced Document Creation Properties dialog box.

Here, you have a rich set of options to specify what the output document will contain, how images will be compressed and many other such requirements.

You can customize these options and save them as a document creation profile for reuse later. This relieves you of the need to remember different settings required to repeatedly perform different conversion jobs.

Additional Features

While Print2eDoc has plenty of format-specific features, there are other features, such as adding watermarks, sending files as e-mail attachments, uploading files to FTP sites, and posting to newsgroups, that are available to all output formats.

By selecting the Watermark button on the General tab on Advanced Document Creation Properties, you can start adding watermarks to output files. Both text as well as images can be used in watermarks. Your watermarks with custom settings can be saved as watermark profiles for reuse and modification.

In the Additional Actions tab, Email settings allow you to use an SMTP server or your default mail client to mail output files to a set of pre-defined e-mail recipients.

Also in Additional Actions tab, FTP settings allow you to upload the converted documents to FTP sites. The interface allows you to navigate the site and select a destination folder.

In the same way, NNTP settings allow you to post converted documents to newsgroups/discussion forums. You need to provide the NNTP server and port settings and if necessary the userID-password combination. Once this is done, you have a list of available newsgroups that you can choose to post your files.

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Gnostice Print2eDoc is currently in beta. You can download and try the software. Click here for the official home page of Print2eDoc.