Saturday, September 02, 2006

Best PDF Creator

If you google for "freeware PDF creator", believe it or not, you get almost 3 million results! Many of the PDF tools are free (as in beer), such as CutePDF, PDF995, Go2PDF, PDF4Free, etc. Yea, it's not difficult at all to locate a free PDF tool, the real challenge is which one is the best?

My vote goes to PDFCreator, a free tool for creating PDF from any Windows applications. It is installed as a virtual Windows printer. It supports PDF encryption for both 40- and 128-bits! It can merge multiple files into a single PDF. As well, it's under GPL so it's 100% free for both home and commercial use!

The tip from me is that in order to create the highest quality PDF files with lossless pictures, you can change the image compression algorithm from "JPEG" to "ZIP", and down sample the resolution to "120". This resolution is generally good enough for distribution.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

this is garbage- it's graphics handling is a joke- even uncompressed it looks like junk

McBurrz said...

I agree and think it is the best PDF creator! Since this original post, there have been several updates to the software which make it much more user friendly and capable to handle rich graphics in PDF files. The PDF Creator Suite offered by McBurrz utilizes this program and a few other PDF applications which may be worth checking out.

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