Print to PDF in Windows XP without installing anything and not being an admin?

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.

3 Answers

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

• does not install Spyware or Adware like PDFCreator, which is acknowledged by PDFCreator.
• is totally open source.

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.

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.

There are some online resources that you can use, if security is not a concern. Check out And perhaps there are Android applications that can read your documents natively or in some other (easy to export) format?