Best Free PDF Writer

by Mike 11 August 2008 13 Comments

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Hey there folks! The Freeware Mission continues despite the fact that I’m a little bit dizzy now because of the Olympic Games – I’m trying to watch my favorite athletes on TV and that means having a lot of sleepless nights. Anyway, here’s another freeware program for you, the best free PDF writer. Which one will it be?

I have to say that I’ve tested many PDF writers, many of them “free”, but unfortunately a lot of them having nasty and annoying limitations. The final two programs that I had to choose from were BullZip and PDFCreator. Finally I chose PDFCreator for two reasons: it’s open source and it can be installed as standalone or as a server application – install on a single computer and have it available on all the machines in your network.

If we get down to the basic functions, PDFCreator has everything you need:
- can create PDF files out of any printable file
- can encrypt your created PDF files
- can create PDF, PNG, JPG, TIFF, PCX, BMP, EPS, PS files out of your documents

It’s a mighty good open source program, I was very impressed.

You can download PDFCreator from here, it’s free! (even for commercial use!)

My Evaluation	10
Operating System	Windows All
Size	15.1 MB
Author	Philip Chinery, Frank Heindorfer
Version Tested	0.9.5

The Freeware Mission will go on, only a few episodes to go!

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13 Comments »

Ruud said:

Why not use openOffice to create PDF?

regards,

ruud

# 5 September 2008 at 6:11 am

Johnny Karp said:

@ruud
Indeed, I can use OpenOffice to create PDF files out of my documents, but PDFCreator has more features that might be useful. It’s a specialized program after all.

# 5 September 2008 at 6:16 am

maarten said:

Have you teste CutePDF (http://www.cutepdf.com/) I Love it, it installs a printer, to which you can print anything and it will output PDF.

I do like your list of freeware programs though!

# 6 September 2008 at 2:22 am

Johnny Karp said:

@maarten
I did play around with CutePDF a little bit, it didn’t impress me… But I think it’s a good alternative.

# 6 September 2008 at 3:12 am

leukerdt said:

Hi
Did you test primopdf ? And do you know about http://freepdfxp.de/index.html
It’s in German but you can set English as well ? I’m using it and I think is ok.
Luc

# 17 September 2008 at 12:26 pm

Johnny Karp said:

@Luc
PrimoPDF is good, but as far as I know the free version prints your stuff with a watermark on, not very nice. I might try FreePDF XP soon, thanks for the tip.

# 22 September 2008 at 11:30 am

Anton said:

Here at work we have been searching for PDF creators that can do the job automatically and correct. It should be used in a controlled (validated) environment. And we came up with PDF Creator. Its easy to install and use, with many options and it can do its job without the user noticing it. We use it as the default printer, having it make PDF’s and send it to the printer in one flow.
I realy recommend it!

# 9 January 2009 at 12:07 pm

Johnny Karp said:

@Anton
Thanks for sharing your view.

# 9 January 2009 at 6:24 pm

Chin Loon Chai said:

Have you looked at any that can create PDF with “commenting” switched on? With that, one can participate in “reviewing” using the latest adobe reader….

# 20 February 2009 at 4:54 am

Johnny Karp said:

@Chin Loon Chai
I’m having trouble understanding what you wanted to say. Could you put it in other words maybe?

# 25 February 2009 at 9:15 pm

raj said:

downloaded PDF creater, but it said it wanted to change some window system file and could not do it. I ignored this step and it still installed the PDF creater. Than when i tried to print it says I need some .dll files missing (looks like gostscript files). do I need to install some thing like Ghostview to use this software, The downloading instrcution on the web site sucks. It doesn’t tell you what your requiremetns are. I cheched on http://www.dopdf.com, it doesn’t seem to requie any gostscript or gostview sofware.

# 5 May 2009 at 7:46 pm

Johnny Karp said:

@raj
The program does use ghostscript. You should check out the program forums, maybe you’ll get better help there.

# 8 May 2009 at 7:07 pm

Tech Guru said:

Here is free PDF tool which I would like to share that is Free PDF cube.

This tool is much faster, better and has lot of functions. Also this free for life

You can try the same from pdfcube.com

The Direct Download link for FREE PDF is

http://pdfcube.com/download/pdf-cube-free.zip

It is 100% FREE PDF Converter and works as a virtual printer. you can convert more than 300 + formats so now you can convert all your Word, Excel, Powerpoint to PDF Free.

# 16 August 2010 at 9:01 pm