PDF file converter

[irneb]

Right with expert PDF 5 you can do a lot more... add edit and delete pages photos and you can even set passwords and permissions on the files in question. Yes PDF Creator is brilliant but if you want to do a bit more then this program is worth its money.

Actually you can do the same in PDFCreator. When plotting, click the Wait-Collect button and the PS file (i.e. pre-PDF) is listed in a table. You can now plot other pages and/or documents, rearrange them to suit your requirements, then Combine them into one single PS. Finally click the Print button and you're now going to save a combined PDF file.

BTW, you can drag-n-drop multiple files onto the PDFCreator's Manager window - this would add them for batch conversion through whatever program opens them. PS/PDF files it can convert directly. And ... of all the PDF makers I've seen (including EXPENSIVE ones) - it's got the most output formats of all (PDF/PNG/JPG/TIF/BMP/PCX/EPS/PS/SVG/etc.). That means you can convert something from one program into any type of file for import into another - most can at least read one/more of the raster formats, but some might be able to open those PS/EPS/SVG vector files.

The new PDFCreator comes standard with 2 extra utilities: Image2PDF which converts one or more images into a PDF (either by resizing and/or recompressing them, or simply embedding them directly - your choice) - this tool is also free.

PDF Architect: Is half free. The free portion is a viewer comparable to Acrobat Viewer. For the rest: http://cart.pdfarchitect.org/
Some of those I can't see the point of: e.g. why would you need yet another module for passwords when the PDFCreator already added the password? IMO this might only ne a "nice to have" if you want to password protect existing PDFs - though even there you could simply have "converted" the original PDF to a new PDF through PDFCreator and thus added the password. Also the Review Module sounds similar to what's already available in free Acrobat Viewer / Foxit - i.e. markup & comment capabilities.

The only thing which is missing in all of these (even if they're supposed to be "extremely" professional): Hyperlinks & Bookmarks don't get added to the PDF from other programs. E.g. I can create a LibreOffice Write document (or if you prefer MSO Word), use its heading styles for my "headings", have an automatically generated table of contents from those, include stuff like an Index at the back, as well as stuff like Table of Tables / Table of Figures. If I use the export directly from LibOff/OpenOff/MSOff I can have these work as hyperlinks to their targets in the document as well as outline-level bookmarks.

And just for your information most (if not all but Adobe) of all these free or otherwise "converters" are actually just a form of "bling"-ing up something you can slap together for yourself from only open-source software: http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSWriter/GSWriter.html With this setup you can effectively customize it to your heart's content, since the RedMon program directs all data sent to the "printer" to a file/pipe which you can send to the GhostScript interpreter - which in turn you can set to perform a multitude of functions. In nearly every instance, GS is the goto commandline tool for doing anything with Post Script files (PS/EPS/PDF). E.g. http://www.ghostscript.com/doc/9.06/Ps2pdf.htm

And another thing if you went with that custom route: If you also installed the optional GSView, you can install an addon (also free) for it called PS2Edit which can convert PS/EPS/PDF files to a great many other formats. I use this to get from a PDF into a DXF so I can edit it as linework in AutoCAD. Otherwise I'd have needed Corel Draw / Adobe Illustrator to get the same - and those are NOT cheap (around R2000 to R10000 depending on "suite")!

[chris_kzn]

I use Bullzip PDF from www.bullzip.com it adds a nice printer to the option and you can even add a background page for letterheads if you like.

[HR Solutions]

Cute Pdf works like a bomb. Its a free version. Not many limitations. It is also linked to your printer file whereby you choose cute pdf and it saves the pdf version.

[irneb]

Cute Pdf works like a bomb. Its a free version. Not many limitations. It is also linked to your printer file whereby you choose cute pdf and it saves the pdf version.

At work they've got CutePDF installed, at home I use PDFCreator. Cute is just that ... cute ...

My issue with it is that in all programs it continually asks you for the filename to which it needs to save. Sometimes not even defaulting to the document's original name. PDFCreator always defaults to the document's name and can even be set to automatically save to a specific folder - so you don't even need to click the OK button. This is highly productive in my case since I do batch converting to PDF on a regular basis and don't want to sit in front of the PC the whole time retyping the filename (or at best clicking the OK button every single instance).

And PDFCreator is also free, it uses the same PDF engine as Cute, so the resulting PDF is exactly the same thing. IMO it's user interface and capabilities is just that much better.

Not to mention, you can even set it to print to a JPG/TIF/PNG/etc. file instead of just the default PDF. That is impossible through CutePDF. Useful when you want to import the page into something else.

[Zesty App Services]

Not sure if this was mentioned but I'm fairly certain that one can "Save As" a word document as a PDF file.

[irneb]

Not sure if this was mentioned but I'm fairly certain that one can "Save As" a word document as a PDF file.

Yes, most programs do come with an export to PDF. Actually it was only from MS Office 2007 that some of their programs could save to PDF (another reason I prefer Open Office / Libre Office - they had PDF export way before, even allowing stuff like document contents tree inside the PDF made from the header sections in the document).

But not all programs have this functionality e.g. say you want to save an email to PDF, see if Outlook has a save to PDF. With these virtual PDF printers you can do it from any program which can print.