I was about 75% through writing a Mudcat tutorial on using .ps and .pdf files, conversion to text and image and all that sort of stuff, when I came across some new FREE software at http://site4.pdf995.com/download.html

It creates a PDF file directly from the output of any Windows application that has print functionality. There's no need to download Ghostscript, GSview or install Postscript printer fonts, plus it's a moderate size at 3.31 Megs. It in fact gives you a small chunk of Ghostscript bundled up with a new printer driver - as best I can understand.

There won't be many people reading this thread, so I would appreciate as much feedback as possible from those willing to give it a try. The download site is quick and installation takes only a minute.

At the risk of leading the witnesses let me just say that on NT it worked like an absolute ball tearer for everything I've thrown at it - every score printing app I could lay my hands on (my main thrust) plus Word, Power Point, Excel and a couple of image editors. Bloody marvellous! On Win 98 however I would have to describe my initial attempts as failures when it came to creating music notation, with all sorts of strange symbols appearing in apps such as NoteWorthy Composer and Encore.

There are some extensions to the download which let you edit the PDF's and add digital signatures, but I haven't concerned myself with that guff.

One major area of mystery for me is that PDF995 seems to work best if the Print to File option is NOT ticked. I didn't see instructions on this topic - or maybe I missed it.

All help greatly appreciated.

Regards, John