PDF Creator

You composed a document and desire to publish or to send to recipients via email or download from a FTP site. There would be times you do not want to send it in editable form such as Word document, spreadsheet, or even a drawing.

Another situation would be your recipients do not have the same application to open your file. Printing on paper is not a good path since you will have to mail or overnight the printed materials. Faxing is another option but the quality will not be good.

You can create a PDF file. PDF (Portable Document Format) is a file format developed by Adobe as a means of distributing compact, platform-independent documents. PDF document may contain images and text, as well as hyperlinks. Use it like a printer in Word, Excel, or any other applications. However, as PDF is based on a variant of PostScript, each document is self-contained, packing text, graphics, and fonts into a single file. Recipients can view the PDF file with the free Adobe Reader or even a web browser with the PDF Viewer plug-in.

Creating a PDF file is basically a printing function much like a printer printing on paper except you will have a file. The Adobe Acrobat that lets you create PDF files sells in the $200-300 range for Standard version and $300-500 range for the Professional version. There are many non-Adobe Acrobat products that can get as freeware and shareware to create PDF files. PDFCreator is one of many that you can try that is free and simple. You can browse the Internet and find something similar that is free or will have a very small cost.

You can download the PDFCreator from here.

There are many other free PDF creator programs to try. Below is a partial list.

Note: Microsoft's Office 12 software and newer supports creating PDF (Portable Document Format) files within its applications.