Friday, April 06, 2007

How-to: Free PDF Creators

Want to create/convert a PDF (portable document format) document? Don't want to shell out several hundred dollars for Adobe? Here are some free software options for creating a PDF from many different document types.

PDF Online
PDF Online is a free web based service (no installation of software) that allows you to create a PDF document from Word, Excel, Powerpoint, HTML, text and most image formats (JPG, GIF, BMP, TIFF, etc.).

PDF Creator
PDF Creator is a free, open source program that will create PDFs from most Windows applications. It allows you to encrypt PDFs and merge multiple files into one PDF. PDF Creator works as a printer driver. If you are working in Microsoft Word, for example, you select "Print" and then choose PDF Creator as your printer.

Cute™PDF Writer
Cute™PDF Writer is the free version of commercial PDF creation software for Windows. It has been updated to support Windows Vista. Cute™PDF also works as a printer driver.

PrimoPDF
PrimoPDF is a free PDF converter. It works as a printer driver and also supports Windows Vista. Version 3.1 introduces the ability to merge and append PDF files.

doPDF
doPDF is a free PDF converter that works as a printer driver. It provides customizable resolution, searchable PDFs and multilanguage support.

Mac OS X offers PDF creation support through printing. When you are ready to convert your document, choose to print (Cmd-P) as a PDF.

Finally, OpenOffice and Google Docs both provide PDF creation as options. Choose to Save as a PDF and you're done!

Here are some of the articles that alerted me to these programs:

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