How to generate a PDF file?

To create PDF files from any music software (or any other application) under Windows, you must install a small program beforehand.
This program can be either a freeware, like DoPDF, PrimoPDF, PDFCreator, a shareware, like  PDF995, or a commercial software package like the tools of the Adobe suite.

Note : Be careful, some freeware programs likePDFCreator  CutePDF ou Bullzip PDF Printer install unwanted adware toolbars in your Web browser. It's highly recommended to disable installation of these toolbars when possible, or to use any other adware-free alternative.

All these programs behave like a new printer for your computer.
When "printing" a document to it, a file name is asked, and the printing result is actually saved in PDF format.

When printing from any program, you will then find a new entry in the printer selector that appears:


Select the printer (here "PDFCreator) then click "Print".
You'll then get a window for entering optional information about the PDF file to be created (Title, date, author...), then a file selector for specifying the name and location of this file.

The PDF file that matches what you asked for being printed is then generated.

Generating a PDF on Mac OS X

With a Macintosh under Mac OS X, it's quite easy to generate a PDF file from any program, by using the print dialog box. Once the file is loaded into the software, select "File>Print". The printer selector opens, and you can select here the page range to be printed. 
In the bottom part of this box, you'll see a "PDF" or "Save as PDF" button.


Click it, select a name for the file and save it. The Adobe PDF document is created on your hard disk at the required location.

Generating a PDF on Linux

Generating a PDF file from any program under Linux needs to use a special printer driver that saves the graphic commands into a file instead of actually printing them on paper.

You can then either send this file by e-mail to somebody else, or process it with PDFtoMusic to convert it into the file format you need.

With KDE, the "kprinter" command (KDEPrint package) includes an option to generate a PDF file:


If this option is not included in your distribution, you'll probably need to use cups-pdf.
To install it under Ubuntu, please refer to this document:
http://ubuntu.wordpress.com/2006/03/23/print-to-pdf-using-cups-pdf/
To install it under another distribution, please read:
http://www.physik.uni-wuerzburg.de/~vrbehr/cups-pdf/download.shtml