Short: Printer driver that writes PDF files Author: marcus.gerards@googlemail.com (Marcus Gerards) Uploader: marcus gerards googlemail com (Marcus Gerards) Type: driver/print Version: 1.2 Replaces: driver/print/PDFPrinter.lha Requires: AmigaOS 1.3 or newer. Prefs editors for 1.3 and 3.2 included. Architecture: m68k-amigaos >= 1.3 Distribution: NoCD Kurz: Druckertreiber: schreibt PDF-Dateien PDFPrinter 1.2 -- 5.9.2026 WHAT IT IS PDFPrinter is an AmigaOS printer driver that does not drive a printer. Instead of sending a job to a port, it captures the job and writes a PDF file. Any application that can print -- a text editor, a database, a paint program's graphic dump -- can therefore produce a PDF, on any Amiga, with no printer attached and nothing connected to the parallel or serial port. Select PDF in Prefs/Printer like any other driver and print as usual. The finished .pdf appears in the output drawer you choose. Text jobs become real, selectable PDF text in the base-14 fonts (Courier, Times or Helvetica), not a picture of text. Bold, italic and underline survive the trip. Accented and a print job says nothing about which character set its national bytes are in, so you tell the driver: Latin-1 (the letters Amiga default), AmigaPL, ISO-8859-2 or Windows-1250. The text still copies and searches correctly. Graphic dumps become an embedded image at its true physical size on the page -- black & white, greyscale or full colour. The PDF is a standard 1.4 file. Images are optionally compressed with the RunLengthDecode or FlateDecode filters, so the result opens in any PDF reader on any platform without extra fonts or plugins. A viewer comes with it. ShowPDF reads the documents this driver writes -- and only those -- on a plain 68000 under Workbench 1.3, so a machine with no other way to open a PDF still has one. The installer asks before copying it, and the driver neither needs nor uses it. WHAT YOU NEED The driver itself runs on Kickstart/AmigaOS 1.3 (V34) and up, for both text and graphics. It needs nothing but DEVS:Printers and enough RAM for the job. Colour depth is the one thing the OS version changes: the driver asks for 8-bit colour guns, which only a V44+ printer.device provides -- AmigaOS 3.5, 3.9, 3.1.4 and 3.2. On anything older the device hands over 4-bit guns and gradients come out in coarser steps. Black & white output is unaffected either way. Colour and greyscale at high densities need contiguous RAM for the page image. The driver caps the resolution to the memory actually available, so even a 4 MB machine renders a full page rather than failing. The ReAction preferences editor needs AmigaOS 3.2 and its ReAction classes. An older ReAction or ClassAct may work but is not officially supported. On 1.3 a small bare-Intuition editor, PDFPrefs13, does the same job. Neither editor is required: the driver ships with sensible built-in defaults. WHAT IS IN THE ARCHIVE OS3.x/ Installer script, the driver, the ReAction preferences editor, the ShowPDF viewer, the AmigaGuide manual, German and Italian catalogs, and a choice of icons (classic or GlowIcons). OS1.3/ AmigaDOS install script, the driver, PDFPrefs13, the ShowPDF viewer, plain-text documentation, and a ready-made install floppy image (.adf). The driver is supplied as one build per processor family: four in the OS3.x drawer (68000, 68020, 68040 and 68060) and three in the OS1.3 drawer, since a 68060 does not run Kickstart 1.3. From the 68020 up the driver runs about a third faster, because its compression leans on the 32-bit multiply and divide instructions the 68000 does not have. Documentation is included in English and German, as an AmigaGuide manual for 2.x/3.x and as plain text for 1.3. INSTALLATION AmigaOS 2.x/3.x -- double-click the Install icon in the OS3.x drawer. Kickstart 1.3 -- the Commodore Installer needs 2.0+, so open the OS1.3 drawer and double-click Install-PDF-Printer instead. Then open Prefs/Printer and choose PDF as the printer type. HISTORY 1.2 Text encoding: AmigaPL, ISO-8859-2 and Windows-1250, so accented and national letters print correctly. The editor's settings now sit on four tabs. The German translation is in the archive. Italian translation by David Lo Buglio. Graphics placed per Printer prefs keep their true size and margins; strip pages stay whole even when taller than the PDF page. Thanks to David Lo Buglio and Lukasz Paczko for reporting the stray density text in the window border on AmigaOS 3.9. 1.1 Pages printed in strips (WordWorth) come out whole. Density-to-dpi readout in the editor. Added GlowIcons by Martin "Mason" Merz. 1.0 First release. LICENCE Copyright (C) 2026 Marcus Gerards. All rights reserved. This covers the driver, the preferences editors and their documentation, catalogs, icons and other supplied files. You may download, install and use the Software free of charge for your own private and personal purposes. It may NOT be sold or otherwise distributed commercially, in whole or in part. It may NOT be bundled or combined with any other software, hardware, magazine, cover disk, collection or product. It may NOT otherwise be published, redistributed or mirrored, in any form, whether modified or unmodified. Each of these requires the author's prior written permission -- please ask first: Marcus Gerards marcus.gerards@googlemail.com The Software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and noninfringement. In no event shall the author be liable for any claim, damages or other liability arising from, out of or in connection with the Software or its use. All rights not expressly granted above are reserved by the author. The full text is in the manual, under "License".