PDFPrinter 1.3 -- 23.9.2026
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
1.3 Underlines line up under Times and Helvetica.
The print job can choose typeface and text colour.
Graphics placed per Printer prefs keep their true size and
margins, and a tall strip page stays one page.
Settings can be saved to and loaded from a file.
Thanks to David Lo Buglio, Lukasz Paczko and Kadi Bamler for
testing and bug reports.
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.
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".
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