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The Adobe Acrobat Reader has become a staple of document sharing in the office environment. Its portability and its cross platform compatibility make it really attractive for, well, anyone. You can easily share documents with folks on Mac, Linux, or Windows. But, if you are wanting to author pdf documents, you can be somewhat limited in terms of what you can use. And, if you are like most folks, you don’t want to have to pay for a software package to do that. Well, have no fear, because you do have some free pdf creators out there.
Okay, let’s run down the list:
PrimoPDF - This program isn’t the smallest install in the world, but the program is pretty good. PrimoPdf installs itself as a printer. As such, you can print to it, just like any other printer. A couple of features are worthy of note here. First is the ability to append to previous pdf docs. That allows you to compile a long pdf document from several. Also, PrimoPDF allows for security encryption (40 and 128 bit). What is nice is that it allows for granular security for things like: allowing copying graphics or text, etc. That’s a nice feature.
PDFCreator - This product from Sourceforge is another impressive offering. Again, all free. This package also has security encryption. There is one caveat on the latest version of this software. I don’t know why they did this, but opt out of the pdfcreator toolbar on the install. You don’t need it. Other than that, this software package is also really nice. It also looks like it has a print server install option. I didn’t try it tho.
doPDF - This is small install file. The footprint is small, but you don’t get all the bells and whistles that some other programs give you. This gives you straight forward pdf printing.
CutePDF - Yet another small install. Download it and it works. Again, doesn’t seem to have all the bells and whistles, but a good program.
And now we come to the online portion of the free offerings. You just knew that someone would write a web app that does the same thing. Pretty smart:
PDFOnline - Creates PDF’s online, but you are limited to 2MB size limitations and no fancy settings.
Neevia’s Online PDF creator - This one has a 1MB size limitation on files, but it also supports encryption. Not bad when you’re in a pinch.
FreePDFConvert - Again, another option to get it emailed to you.
O!pdf - This is an interesting concept. This is an online editor that will instantly output the results to pdf. It doesn’t do pdf conversion, just raw output. Still, neat idea.
Let us know if you have any others in your toolkit.
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