Cool tools: free PDF creation software for Windows
We've recently been advising clients using Microsoft Windows on the tricky issue of generating PDF files. Unlike competing business OS products like Ubuntu, Windows is hamstrung right out of the gate in its inability to generate PDFs without third-party software. Customers often believe that they have to purchase Adobe's costly Acrobat software simply to create PDFs—and Adobe's products ship with their own particular set of issues.
Fortunately, thanks to the power of open source, creating PDFs from practically any Windows app needn't cost any money. PDFCreator enables instant, easy PDF creation for zero cost. It's a small download, and once installed it will appear to your software apps as a "virtual" printer. Instead of printing out paper documents, any file sent to the virtual PDFCreator printer will instead be converted into a PDF, which can then be saved to disk:
In short, you can create PDFs from any Windows app that you can print from—particularly useful for converting web pages into PDFs. Note that while PDFCreator enables PDF generation, it does not create editable PDFs. However, the most common scenario when creating editable PDFs is when dealing with text documents, and for this the LibreOffice open source office suite features fully editable PDF support.
Between PDFCreator and LibreOffice, the vast majority of your business PDF creation and editing bases are covered—and Adobe Acrobat with its cost and licensing hooks can be relegated to the small fraction of niche fields where it's genuinely needed.
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