I regularly have to create pdf invoices which some companies seem to prefer over other forms of documents and I have been using doc to pdf online converters until now that would convert the Microsoft .doc file into the Adobe .pdf file. I have two major problems with this procedure however.
The first is that i have to upload my invoice to a website so that it can be processed and converted into the portable document format. This is a privacy issues and I love my privacy as you all know. The second is that websites come and go and there is no telling if the website with the converter script will be there the next year.
I therefor decided to try some local solutions to create pdf documents without having to purchase Adobe Acrobat. WinPDF Writer is such a solution. It creates a virtual printer that creates pdf documents out of any text document that you create in Windows applications.
It’s working flawlessly with Microsoft Office and I suppose it would work with other applications as well. I just have to select the virtual printer to create the pdf document.
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PDFCreator for the win.
I will strongly recommend PDF Creator in this category because of the extensive feature set and also because of the optimized pdfs it creates. I have tried more than half a dozen solutions before settling on this one. Although some might also like Primo PDF which is a close second for me.
It’s the typical case in which someone in the crowd shouts “Get a Mac!” ;)
PS: Apple put PDF creation as default in the print dialogue
I have had great sucess with doPDF (free). Very tiny and fast. Handles complex graphics output very well.
Not bad. A very niffty program for the legit. For the illegit there’s always the free downloads of Adobe Acrobat Professional. They’ve even cracked the version 8 series for Vista already.
Welcome to 2008 Martin :)
There are a bunch of free PDF converter apps out there. I used PDFCreator for a long time, but ran into a conflict between it and Truecrypt 4.x, where the PDF create process wouldn’t work on systems that had TrueCrypt 4.x installed.. I haven’t tested if the problem still exists with TrueCrypt 5.x. I also don’t like that PDFCreator hasn’t been updated in maybe 2 years. Unfortunately, this is a common problem with open source product.
Right now I am using DoPDF and it seems to work OK. Microsoft also offers a plug-in for Office 2007 offering PDF saving capability.
Quote: “Dante says, February 17th, 2008
Not bad. A very niffty program for the legit. For the illegit there’s always the free downloads of Adobe Acrobat Professional. They’ve even cracked the version 8 series for Vista already.”
Acro 8 is complex, slow, POS (piece of sh*T), not to mention a fair security risk on your machine. In my experience, most people don’t need it. They just want to “print” to a pdf occasionallly.
Plus, why not run something without the guilt ;)
mule
@mule. That’s why I said for the illegit. I personally have my company pay for the copy. But Acrobat Pro is useful when you need to edit or interact with a pdf doc on occasions. And it’s not such a security risk if you have all your firewalls and anti-virus scans running properly.
I used PDF Creator for a long time too, but one day it just stopped working for me. Even the newest version does not work. Very disappointing…