The best way to create pdf documents

Martin Brinkmann
Aug 22, 2007
Updated • Jul 30, 2013
Tutorials
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12

I have been using two methods to create pdf documents lately and made the decision to stick with one of them after evaluating both of them. Creating pdf documents is not something that I have to do on a daily basis but it was always a rather complicated process because I did not want to purchase a professional version of Adobe Acrobat only to create a handful of documents each year.

The first method that I discovered was an online service that creates a pdf document out of documents that I upload to their website. The newly created pdf document is then transferred to the email address that you enter on the page there. While this method has the advantage that it can be used without software installation, it has a few disadvantages that need to be mentioned.

The most important concern for me are privacy concerns. I sometimes have to convert documents that I don't want to expose to others and I don't want to take that risk even if it is a slim one. Documents that you need to convert need to be uploaded to the server for obvious reasons, and while that is not an issue for some documents, you may not want to upload financial, health or other important documents to the service.

A far better solution in my opinion is doPDF which installs itself as a pdf printer on your system. Whenever you would need a pdf document you would simply choose to print - which does not print but save - the document that you want to convert.

This way a pdf document is created without third party involvement which is way better in my opinion.

Take a look at the YouTube video to watch a demonstration:

The benefit of using the software are that the documents are processed on the local system, so that it does not need to be transferred to a third party server. You do not need an Internet connection as well to create the document, and while most computers are connected to the Internet these days, it is still reassuring that this is not a requirement.

Last but not least, it is fairly certain that the second method supports additional document types and formats,. Basically, if you can print something on your system, you can create a pdf document out of it. This includes documents but also image formats for example.

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Comments

  1. tartooob said on March 25, 2009 at 7:24 pm
    Reply

    Thanks a lot, really needed this <3

  2. KANY said on September 24, 2008 at 6:17 pm
    Reply

    The Greenprint freeware version was so good that I “donated” the purchase fee. It’s easy to save an HTML document in original (rather than text) form as a pdf file with or without printing it. This program also does away with printing the ‘extra’ page.

  3. Mehdi said on February 8, 2008 at 10:55 am
    Reply

    cutePDF FTW! Love it….. :)

  4. P said on August 25, 2007 at 10:12 am
    Reply

    doPDF does not embed fonts.

  5. M3dL@r said on August 23, 2007 at 7:15 am
    Reply

    I use PrimoPDF, which is free. You create a PDF-doc by just ‘printing’ to the PrimoPDF-printer. Easy.

  6. SallyC (Solid Documents LLC) said on August 22, 2007 at 9:25 pm
    Reply

    If you do this a lot you might want to consider purchasing Solid PDF Creator (available through download.com) or Solid Converter PDF, which also converts PDF to Word and vice versa. The PDF plug-in in Word is handy for creating PDF on the spot from Word docs.

  7. Tim said on August 22, 2007 at 8:51 pm
    Reply

    I use CutePDF, less because of the issue of buying Acrobat but because of all the invasive junk that Acrobat integrates into the windows apps on my system.
    http://www.cutepdf.com

  8. Martin said on August 22, 2007 at 8:49 pm
    Reply

    Dante I removed the post, probably a test post from a spammer.

  9. Miguel Galego said on August 22, 2007 at 5:37 pm
    Reply

    Well, I use PDFCreator that does the same but it’s open source.
    http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

  10. Dante said on August 22, 2007 at 2:37 pm
    Reply

    C- for “test”. No proper grammatical structure :)

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