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At work we are running Windows XP Pro and I am not an administrator. I regularly have to print documents to take with me and I'd rather print them to a PDF and load them directly on my Android phone than carrying around a paper copy.

Is there any way to print to PDF without having administrator access? Also, I'm not looking for Open Office's export to PDF function, I want it to be a printer so any program that can print can access it. Could I run something like this off of a thumb drive?

Edit: What about printing to a file? Doesn't xp natively support postscript printing? Then the second part to that would be easily converting the .ps file to a PDF. This would basically only add one step to the process I'm trying to achieve above. Is this possible without admin privileges?

Edit 2: I should have mentioned, we don't have access to the internet, and I can't save my documents in any way. I can only print. That's why I want to print to a file, so I can save it.

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Firstly, your question says “without installing anything and not being an admin”. That makes most of this answers off topic, but let me join them because my answer is better.

This answer uniquely

Use RedMon with GhostScript. RedMon essentially redirects a printer port to a program; GhostScript is a program that generates normalized PostScript®.

You can find RedMon here with more information about it.

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  • Following the installation instructions leads the user to run setup.exe which, as the instructions explicitly say, requires administrator privileges.
    – LondonRob
    Mar 20, 2017 at 15:20
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You can't add a printer without administrative rights. The only way I know of to do this is to install software like CutePDF or the export function within Open Office or Microsoft Office.

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    Don't use CutePDF. That's nagware IIRC. Use something that's open-source and truly free like PDFCreator.
    – frabjous
    Nov 8, 2010 at 4:39
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    @frabjous: PDFCreator installs an adware toolbar. I use Bullzip at home and it's clean but I need to find some way to do this without the ability to install software.
    – matt
    Nov 8, 2010 at 4:42
  • @MHrappstead You think I could run CutePDF/PDFCreator/Bullzip on my thumb drive?
    – matt
    Nov 8, 2010 at 4:43
  • It's way overkill, but you can run qemu from a thumbdrive and have a machine to which you DO have admin access. I had to do this to do some labs for school where they did "deepfreeze" on the computers without configuring the applications properly and it kept resetting options on the locally installed software to broken. again way overkill Nov 8, 2010 at 5:12
  • I couldn't see you being able to use CutePDF, PDFCreator, or Bullzip straight off a thumb drive. I've never tried what aking1012 suggests but it sounds like a fun project to try out one day. Would you be able to give us some more information about why you don't have administrative rights. I'm pretty sure I know why but I don't want to make any assumptions. If we had a little more information we might be able to find a workaround to your problem. Nov 8, 2010 at 14:23
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There are some online resources that you can use, if security is not a concern. Check out http://www.pdfonline.com And perhaps there are Android applications that can read your documents natively or in some other (easy to export) format?

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  • This is the only answer that meets the "without installing anything" and "not being an admin" +1. Although, you may not like passing your docs to an online service.
    – hookenz
    Nov 8, 2010 at 21:18
  • I forgot to mention that we have no access to the internet on our workstations. The other issue is that with the primary software I'm using there's no way to save documents. It just prints reports to the printer. We used to have OneNote on our computers and I could print to onenote then put the page on my thumb drive but we got new computers and they have failed to reload office.
    – matt
    Nov 8, 2010 at 22:39

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