Free Fast Virtual PDF Printer

I’m currently using the Screen grab extension in Firefox to save complete websites as pdf files to read them later or print them eventually. Screen grab has some limitations, mainly size of the website that should be saved and that it only works in Firefox. I sometimes use Opera or want to convert other documents such as emails to pdf.

DoPDF looks like the perfect replacement for Screen Grab. It is a freeware application for Windows and takes only a few megabytes of hard drive space. It adds a virtual printer to your installed printers in Windows and you can choose to make it the default one. Please make sure that the Print Spooler service is running during installation, otherwise the setup of the virtual printer will fail.

Once installed you can select the virtual printer in every print screen with the option to configure the output further. It is possible to define width and height or use predefined formats for the output. The last step is to simply select a filename and location for the newly created pdf file.

It will be saved in that location on your hard drive and displayed when the creation finishes. I decided to stress test it a little bit. The creation of a 41 paged text document took only two seconds. I uninstalled Screen grab immediately after seeing this incredible results.

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Author: Martin Brinkmann, Thursday March 8, 2007 -
Tags:adobe, dopdf, pdf printer, print pdf, screen grab

Responses so far:

1. Peter Huesken says:

   March 9, 2007 at 12:22 pm

   I´ve used CutePDF for some time now, which seems to have the same functionality (and is 1Mb smaller)
   http://www.cutepdf.com/

   Any reason why I should schoose doPDF over CutePDF ?

   Thanks in advance.

   Cheers,
   Peter

   Reply
2. Martin says:

   March 9, 2007 at 1:53 pm

   The only difference that I can see is that CutePdf reguires Ghostscript while doPDF does not.

   Reply
3. Mika says:

   March 9, 2007 at 2:21 pm

   Hey,

   it’s PDF-day today :-).

   DoPDF is nice if you’re somewhere where it is installed.

   But if you want to convert to pdf anywhere else, you can convert them online (files or html to-> pdf).
   Check this out right here: http://ilkeryoldas.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-create-pdf-without-software.html

   Reply
4. Gian Luca says:

   March 9, 2007 at 10:34 pm

   Hey give a try to this:
   http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator
   It works and is open source too! :)

   Reply
5. ME says:

   March 11, 2007 at 2:09 am

   I just created two pdfs, one with PDF Creator and one with doPDF. PDF Creator’s file was 58k and doPDFs was 96k and was a bit fuzzier than PDF Creators.

   Reply
6. vinhluu says:

   March 6, 2009 at 7:08 pm

   I bought PDF Creator for 9.99-Window Vista does not accepr it ! even I installed it but cannot use it.

   Reply