Adobe Postscript Display Format (PDF) files are one the great wonders of the past decade or so — a completely portable format for documents, letting you create something that anyone can read, even if they don’t have the original application that created it.
Unfortunately, Adobe, with it’s various versions of it’s Acrobat tool for reading and creating PDF files, has been insistent on (a) jacking up the price of everything PDF-related other than their free reader, (b) adding eleventy zillion bells and whistles to said applications (“It’s a portable document creator! No, it’s a forms tool! No, it’s for annotations! No, it’s a dessert topping!”), and (c) building applications, even the basic reader, that are slower than molasses and huge memory hogs.
So I’m not playing that game any more. On my machine I now have:
1. FoxitReader, a free, fast PDF reader. And for a very little bit of trouble, I’ve upgraded it for free to a version that allows annotations on PDF files (which is great for typing up forms rather than printing and handwriting on them — the bane of any school-age parent’s existence).
2. PDFCreator, a free open source tool that lets you create PDF files just like Acrobat Writer does. Only, y’know, for free. And fast. (Foxit has a PDF creator, too, but I didn’t see it.)
Recommended.
Thanks for the tip! I was getting sick of using online conversion to make pdf files. I downloaded PDFCreator and I’ll give it a shot.
It has a slightly funky interface — probably because it’s cross-platform, open source, and also designed to server as a PDF server in a network. But it seems to work just fine so far.
Foxit Reader totally rocks. I have seen the Adobe reader completely skotch a system, putting it in an endless reboot loop from which there is no (user) escape. Ripped out Adobe’s bloated, whiny, update-seeking, slow reader and put in Foxit, and the user was right back in action.
Of course, those of us who use OpenOffice have had 1-click .pdf creation for years now… /snark
I was gonna say…Open Office.
If you haven’t tried CutePDF (freeware) you might want to give it a try. Converts .docs into PDFs and vice versa. Easy to use too.
We’re a heavy enough of an Office shop that switching to OpenOffice isn’t much of an option. And, since I’m not paying for it, Office isn’t that much of a burden.
Well at least Office ’07 has the native capability to make .pdf’s. They must have realized that’s at least as important as a fancy ribbon interface that half the users can’t figure out.