Create PDF Files for Free

One of the easiest ways to document web pages and other printable content is to "print" them into a PDF file. Adobe's Acrobat program provides a printer driver to create such files from anything that you can print.

Of course, Acrobat is out of reach for many people, or at least, we don't have any desire for the program once we find that the price is $250 for Acrobat Standard or $400 for Acrobat Professional.

Fortunately, there are some cheaper options.

I've used the program Click2PDF ,(Click2PDF review) for about six years and been very happy with it. Click2PDF allows me to print multiple times, even from multiple programs, change the order of the "prints" and then save the resulting PDF file. If I don't like any of those prints, I can uncheck them and print again. My main use for Click2PDF is to document purchases on the 'Net.

I've recently found a free, open-source program called PDFCreator. It still hasn't quite made the version 1.0 release yet, but has a lot of nice features. PDFCreator is licensed under the GNU Public License.

Like Click2PDF and most of the other PDF creation programs, PDFCreator installs as a pseudo-printer. To use it, you just click on a print icon or File > Print from a program's menu bar.

There's an optional advertising toolbar included in PDFCreator. I chose to uncheck the toolbar option during the installation (it is selected/checked by default).

Altough PDFCreator will let you print multiple documents and let you change the order of items to be saved in the file, the version I installed (v0.9.5) was unable to save these items. Further, it wanted to save them in .ps (PostScript) format rather than .pdf (Portable Document Format).

Bottom line: It's an interesting program and is planned to do the functions I need, but isn't quite there, yet. I'll use it on my desktop, but stay with Click2PDF on my notebook. My notebook is my primary computer.

You can get the latest version of PDFCreator at its home at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/.

Copyright © 2008 Terry A. Stockdale. All rights reserved.