13 June 2007

Who Needs Adobe Acrobat Professional?

Believe it or not, you don't need the full (read: expensive) version of Adobe Acrobat Professional to make PDF files. There are free ways of saving your documents so that they always look and print exactly the way you intended -- no matter who opens them.

There are a number of free "PDF maker" programs out there. You can Google "pdf maker" to compare the leading ones. I happen to like this popular one:

http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp

CutePDF works by creating a virtual printer on your computer. When you go to print to this "printer", it saves what would be your "printout" to a file on your PC. So you can use CutePDF in any program that prints! Your printouts become virtual pages right on your hard drive.

You can also go to the Adobe website and used their web-based converter for a free trial period:

http://createpdf.adobe.com/

Either way, there's no sense in shelling out big bucks for Adobe Acrobat Pro if all you need is simple PDF-making capability.

1 comment:

CleggoMyEggo said...

The new version of Microsoft Office 2007 has the ability to "print PDFs as well. In fact, there are many new features in Microsoft Office 2007. Although, you still have to shell out big bucks for the software.