RSS FeedFri 23 Jan 2009
It’s been awhile since I have put anything into my open source software category so I figured it would be a good time to do that. The software that I am going to talk a little bit about today will allow you to create PDF documents from any program that is able to print.
I must admit, I haven’t personally used this nice little utility, but PDFCreator appears to be quite handy. Since I haven’t personally used or tested it I’m not for certain, but it appears that it installs as a printer and you just go into your print menu and select it as your output.
This will provide a nice, basic, quick, and easy to use method of creating PDF documents from just about anything while incorporating some more advanced features as well. It may even be more versatile than some of the other methods that I have used in the past and will likely find a home on my computer in the near future.
Along with PDFs, it appears to be able to create image files such as the PNG, JPEG, TIFF, and BMP formats. This added functionality could be nice in certain situations as well, I would imagine that it could be useful for taking a “screenshot” of a website and being able to display the entire page rather than just the part currently visible on your screen.
If you’re concerned about security, it also includes the ability to encrypt and password protect the PDF files it creates (I’m not sure about files saved in an image format) to prevent them from being opened by unintended recipients.
If you’ve wanted to make a PDF file but didn’t have the means to do it, give this little utility a try and it just might be exactly what you were looking for. I know I’ll probably be installing it the next time I have a PDF I want to make or want to take a “screenshot” of a particular website.
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Nick, I think you’re getting a bit slack if you haven’t even tried PDFCreator yourself
However, I’ve been using PDFCreator for years, and can definitely recommend it. It’s free, opensource, and it works very well.
I use it for generating PDF versions of Word documents and other documents that need to be distributed, and also use it for keeping a copy of statements/receipts/etc when purchasing items on the internet, rather than printing out a hard copy.
Thanks for your personal recommendation of it. I have looked for something like this in the past, but usually ended up finding some sort of work-around to get it done because I was unaware of this utility. Since discovering it, I just haven’t had any need to use it so haven’t installed it
Does it enable clickable link creation within the PDF also?
Nick - please darken link colors, they’re a bit light.
@Dennis: I think it depends what application you’re using to create the source document.
I just created a test document in Word, with a hyperlink, created a PDF from it using PDFCreater, and confirmed that the hyperlink shows up in the PDF as a clickable link.
However, a PDF created with PDFCreator from a web browser doesn’t have clickable links (I just tried with Firefox, Opera, IE and Chrome, with the same results from each).
Makes sense, thanks for the follow up.
Hey, thanks for helping out and answering Dennis’s question!
PDFCreator link leads to a parked page…no download as I can see.
Oops, that was my mistake. I fixed the link so it should work now. Thanks for bringing that to my attention.
You can also download the installers (and source) from the PDFCreator SourceForge page.
Thanks for the fix!
Hey Nick Thanks for the information. I have never used the PDF Creator. As I was not having details regarding that.
N yeah thanks to Martin also for approving it as good one.