Mac users

[amalthia]

Hi, are there any Mac users here that are willing to share any tips and tricks for creating PDFs or RTF documents on a Mac computer?

I'd really appreciate any and all help or online guide links?

Comments

[aranel-took.livejournal.com]

I do all my writing in Scrivener and StoryMill, so I need to export to a word processor to share my stories. I use TextEdit (the Mac's basic text editor included with OS X). I just copy/paste my text into it and Save As RTF. I can also use it to export to HTML without any inline CSS. If you want "clean" HTML from the RTF, go into Preferences and under "Open and Save", change "Styling" to 'No CSS'. I also use UTF-8 and HTML 4.01 Strict as settings and it seems to work out pretty well. In turn, I can use that HTML in Calibre to create LRF.

For PDFs, I use Apple's Pages. I open or copy/paste my RTF version into Pages, then add the formatting that PDF can handle (custom fonts and graphics). PDF is a built-in file format to save to. If you're using a pseudonym/screenname, you'll want to "print to PDF" rather than "Export" so you can change the author information. I had trouble with that overriding the Author I had set in the Info field of the document with my real name.

I've never used Word, but I imagine it's going to be similar to Pages in how the PDFs are handled.

Any other questions, just ask! :-)

[amalthia]

You're a lifesaver! :)

I've been trying to think of a work around for this person I know to create RTF's and PDFs. I think she's using Word 2004 in Mac and for some reason all the paragraph spacings are lost when she converts to RTF and not knowing anything about Mac programs I felt out of my depth in helping figure out what's going on.

But I'll look into the programs you mentioned and link her to this post.

I can't thank you enough!

[aranel-took.livejournal.com]

No problem! :-)

If she's using Word and doesn't have Pages, her best bet may be to copy/paste into TextEdit and format the document there. TextEdit will also "print to PDF". I just use Pages for PDF because it has all the document formatting features (header styles and the like).

[asperityq.livejournal.com]

Mac OS X handles PDF creation through its print function in any application, so whatever you're using, you can just print, then "save as PDF" and you're done.

RTFs are more of a pain. You can just copy text into TextEdit, but I've been having trouble with RTFs created that way (as in, they were originally HTML) displaying properly on my Reader. Look fine on the computer, though. Probably a font issue. Must investigate.

[amalthia]

But what about changing the page size? Is that relatively easy to accomplish? I know in Word you just go to page setup and enter the page size and hit print as pdf...

Hmm, I'm still not sure why all the paragraphs get smushed together for this person I'm trying to help.

[asperityq.livejournal.com]

Page size is pretty easy to change; there's a list of common paper sizes and you can select any of them, or set up a custom size. And yeah, you can do this in Word or any other program at all that prints, and it's all just in the print drop-down.

Wish I could help on the RTF paragraph issue -- I haven't worked much with converting Word-original stuff to RTF, but if it's already in Word I'd work with Word's own save-as RTF function.

Once I've got a handle on how to set up RTF files to display properly on my Reader, I'll let y'all know about it in case it helps anyone. Are the paragraphs getting smushed straightaway as displayed by Word, or is it showing up like that on another device?

[amalthia]

I opened it on my computer before I had the chance to move it over to my reader. Since the device displays rather accurately what's shown on the RTF file I assumed if the file had no paragraph breaks neither would the copy moved onto my reader.

[elf]

(I know this is old.)

Doesn't Open Office have a Mac version? It'll do RTFs very similar to how Word sets them up.

And AbiWord is a very simple word processing program that's good for basic stuff.

[amalthia]

Hey I'm okay with getting replies to posts that are over a week old. :) I'm rather sure Open Office has a mac version. Basically, I've kind of given up on being able to help this person figure out how format stories. :( It's really hard to trouble shoot and she's kind of disappeared lately. It's just I really thought creating RTF files would be super easy because I thought all major word processing programs could do it.