Kerkia

Background

Adobe’s PDF (portable document format) has become a standard for exchanging documents. While there are a few readers including from Adobe, you have to pay a premium to get Adobe’s PDF edition tool. Another option is to use the save as PDF option that more and more tools do include, and this is the case for example of the major Office suites, whether from Microsoft or OpenOffice.org. There are however a few tools that allow creating PDF files by installing a print driver that, when selected, will produce a PDF file instead of printing the document. This therefore supports any kind of format you can print, and those are the purpose of our recommendations in this article.

Recommendations

A rather simple solution is PrimoPDF. While not bloated with features it does support the important one including pre-defined quality settings, document properties and password protection. We recommend it for most users. A nice online PDF converter is also offered, that allows you to upload any type of document to then receive a PDF version of it. For those of you who don’t like free versions of commercial products, doPDF (http://www.dopdf.com/) may be for you; it does not support password protection and document properties however, and quality settings are to be defined as dpi only.

For a more complete solution, we recommend PDF Creator, Bullzip PDF Printer and PDFill Writer, rather than paying for the Pro version of PrimoPDF (called nitro professional). The reason we recommend those three products rather than just one is simply that we’ve not managed to decide which one is best yet; your feedback on this point would be most welcome though.

PDF Creator is an open source project that offers a very solid and complete solution. It supports all major desirable features including encryption, merging, image outputs, etc, and recently added a very nice one: the ability to digitally sign documents. The one feature we find missing however is the ability to define the document presentation options and to produce watermarks.

Bullzip PDF printer is fully featured, with support for password protection, encryption, quality settings, document properties, watermark, background, append/prepend and image outputs. It however lacks the support for view preferences and presentation options; no signing either.

PDFFill Writer has a very similar and complete feature set, with also support for cropping, view preferences, presentation options and advanced post-formatting; it does not feature digital signing however. It comes also with PDFill PDF Editor and PDFill Tools, whether you like it or not, the former being not all that free hence not much useful to you and the latter being free and possibly interesting. Post-processing actions are to be done in the Editor however, which makes for a rather complicated workflow depending on what you do.

Web links

PrimoPDF

Web site: http://www.primopdf.com/index.aspx

Download: http://www.primopdf.com/index.aspx

Online: http://www.primopdf.com/online.aspx

PDF Creator

Web site: http://en.pdfforge.org/pdfcreator

Download: http://en.pdfforge.org/download

Bullzip PDF Printer

Web site: http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php

Download: http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php#download

PDFill Writer

Web site: http://www.pdfill.com/freewriter.html

Download: http://www.pdfill.com/freewriter.html