Building a printable & hypertext PDF Catalogue

[thepeoplespal]

Does anyone know of some cheap (shoestring budget here folks) way of creating a catalogue for my dress business and whether it would be convertable to a PDF file.

Ideally what I'd like to do is have a downloadable catalogue that customers could download for future perusal at their leisure, with live links to our website, should they want to buy a dress. Along with this I'd like to have a reasonably professional finish to allow them to print it out if needs be.

I'd also like to be able to use this to get a printing firm to do run of a few 100 copies if we are attending any wedding fairs or exhibitions, with the option to print extra copies. (This might require a higher quality to look professional)

I have a static page used as an internal search page here: www.berkswelldirect.com/plus-size-dress/lilac-dress.html , but it doesn't really print out very well.

So does anyone know of any software like this (mention of an expensive way is okay) and will it meet both needs?

Thanks in advance.

[miniman]

There are a number of server-side PDF tools such as PDFLib and ABCPdf which will dynamically generate PDFs from the content on your site - you can certainly include links and so-on. You could create a template and then stream in the products from the site - the advantage being that each time the "catalogue" is created, it is based on current products rather than potentially going out of date.

Mail me if you want any more info.

[Bodo]

Scribus is a DTP tool for generating PDF files. It's open source, so it is free to download. You'd need some kind of Unix/Linux computer do run it though.

Your project sounds like it is complex, so better get a graphic-designer to do it, when you want state of the art quality.

[chrishillcoat]

There's a free program called PDF995 (www.pdf995.com/) which appears as a printer driver, so you can prepare the document and "print" it to your hard drive.

Chris

[thepeoplespal]

miniman said:

There are a number of server-side PDF tools such as PDFLib and ABCPdf which will dynamically generate PDFs from the content on your site - you can certainly include links and so-on. You could create a template and then stream in the products from the site - the advantage being that each time the "catalogue" is created, it is based on current products rather than potentially going out of date. Mail me if you want any more info.

Sorry for not answering sooner, probably not worth my while mailing you, they sound very expensive, if they can do that and I ain't got the cashflow to go to mad just yet, but something to put in the memory banks for another time, perhaps.

[thepeoplespal]

chrishillcoat said:

There's a free program called PDF995 (www.pdf995.com/) which appears as a printer driver, so you can prepare the document and "print" it to your hard drive. Chris

This sounds very promising, especially the bit about embedded links, I've been able to create small pdf files using Adobe-Photoshop, but they don't always render perfectly (according to one of the small advert companies we send work to).

Guess I'll have to do a bit more on the DTP side though.