On our XP PC we have the full purchased suite of www.pdf995.com/. It has a free version if you do not mind putting up with a sponsor page when you use it. It is also pretty reasonable to purchase a full version.
However on setting up our Vista PC, I decided to test our the “free” versions. The information would help my non-profit or low budget clients.
After some serious googling, checking of reviews and general due diligence, I came to the conclusion that there are 3 main downloadable options:
- DoPDF is provided by SoftLand a Romainian company and I do like their nice clean looking website. It installed easily and has a usable feel about it. I think I like it best so far for plain pdf writing.
- CutePDF - it seems to be well regarded, it installed on vista with no issues and does the job. Reasonable user interface. It requires a PS2PDF converter and provides a link to the free Ghostscript version. They also have a professional PDF writer and provide an evaluation version for that . I needed a “scan to pdf” interim option since the Canon provided software for my scanner was not happy with the scanner and I was tired of trying to solve that problem. The evaluation version solved the scan to pdf option nicely, so it is good to know I can purchase CutePDF pro if I am unable to get the MP toolbox to recognise the scanner! The evaluation version has a page that displays when scanning and insert a “produced by evaluation version” text at the bottom of the scanned page. It is sold by Acro Software in the US. Both the free and pro versions are reasonably lightweight files (1.5 M and 3.8M ).
- PrimoPDF also installed easily on Vista and worked well. The file is huge though (21 Mb). I have not explored it further. It is also sold by a US firm ActivePDF. They also provide a free online conversion to pdf.
Alternatively there are some web based PDF conversion tools that allow you to convert from various formats to a PDF file without having to have software on your PC. Very useful if you are using some one else’s PC or on the road at an internet cafe! Here is one, called PDF online. Click on the doctypes to convert a document of that type.