>>We need to be able to send documents in a readable format to many places. I thought about Adobe PDF files.
>>
>>Does anyone send their data in PDF format for viewing by others? If so what does it take to be able to save data in that format. I have a call in to Adobe and am waiting on a response. I wanted to check here also, so maybe I do not have to reinvent the wheel.
>You need to look for PDF converters. There are some on the market. Adobe Acrobat full version comes with PDF Writer. I use Amyuni.com. After all they are just another printers on your system. Thus when you print you can select them as a printer to print to. Your program before sends anything to print has to set a file name for these printers. Programs do that differently, but concept is same: Set file name, select converter as a printer, send report to that printer (not file!!!) and you have a PDF file.
>HTH Mark



all the above have answered your question well. would offer an additional observation about a recent project....

i have output that consists of a concatenation of up to 17 separate reports.
therefore, when printing them, it was a nuisance to send 17 jobs to the
printer, with the possibility that somebody else's print job might get
mixed in. it was equally a pain to e-mail the output as 17 different
attachments, so of course combining them into a single entity was the
thing to do.

not saying you want to go to all this trouble, but using acrobat 5.0,
i produce 17 separate ps (postscript) files using the generic postscript printer driver from adobe.com (autogenerating the filenames). then programatically generate a postscript script file which invokes the /prun command, and enumerate those 17 postscript files. distill the postscript script file, produce a single pdf file. then run reader to open the file and let user print, fax, e-mail, etc. invoked both distiller and reader using createprocess & waitforsingleobject api functions.

the advantage of adobe reader 5.0 over 4.0, is that it now has a
graphics selection tool. you can cut any section of the pdf doc and
paste it into (for example) a word or powerpoint document.