Looking for pdf software

[marcusluis]

Looking for some pdf editing software to make gaming stat cards, any suggestions, prefearanly free software..

[matakishi]

Scribus is free.
http://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Scribus

[Westfalia Chris]

Have you tried using Microsoft Office (or Open Office, for that matter) to create the layout, then save it as a PDF? I've found the PDF export functions of the recent Office suites quite suitable for that purpose.

Scribus is rather good, too. I've found it a bit tricky and resource-hungry, but that was several years (and computers) ago.

[fred]

Do you mean something to edit an existing PDF or to create a PDF from scratch.

If it's the later then any software can be used along with a PDF printer drive.

[Wirelizard]

It's fairly easy to produce something as PDF these days. As others have already mentioned both OpenOffice/LibreOffice and recent MS Office versions will do it natively, as will lots of other programs, and you can also use "Print to File/Print to PDF" drivers for programs that don't do PDF natively.

Editing existing PDFs is a lot tougher, but I've had good luck sometimes just importing the PDF into the GIMP open source graphic editor to change one page. PDF is a publishing format, basically, it's not really designed to be edited once it's been saved in PDF.

For doing stat cards, player handouts and other things that involve graphics, I'm a huge fan of Inkscape - www.inkscape.org - which is an open source vector graphic editing program. It's got fantastic documentation and tutorials available to get you started, and it's awesomely powerful. I use it all the time to create gaming material.

The "inkscape" tag over on my blog will show you some of what I've used the program for: http://www.warbard.ca/tag/inkscape/