Tech Tip 110 - PDFs on the Cheap in Windows

The Portable Document Format (PDF), created by Adobe Systems has become a popular way to exchange and print documents. You see PDFs just about everywhere -- on the Web, included with the software you buy, and even the documents sent to commercial printers. It’s easy to understand the popularity of PDF because they maintain the formatting -- the layout, images, fonts, and more—of the original document.

Conventional wisdom says that you need Adobe Acrobat to be able to create PDF files in Windows. With a $299 price tag, Acrobat is a little pricey for the average user. It also packs more features than most of us will ever use.

Anyway, you don’t need to spend that kind of money to create and manipulate PDFs. You can do it cheaply, and even for free. Curious? Then keep reading.

There’s quite a bit of free and low-cost software for creating PDFs in Windows. Some of it is good. Much of it isn’t. Here are a few free PDF generators that won’t let you down.

First up is PrimoPDF, which gets installed on your computer as a printer driver. That means you can use it with any application. I tried PrimoPDF with several programs and it worked perfectly. All you need to do is select File > Print in your application, and then choose PrimoPDF from the dropdown list. Then you’re ready to go.

With PrimoPDF, you can set up your PDF so that it can can be viewed on-screen or in an electronic book reader, or printed on a conventional printer or a press.

On top of that, you can add a password to the PDF and prevent users from printing, copying, or modifying the file. You can also change the document’s information -- like title, author, subject, and keywords.

PrimoPDF can be a bit slow, but it produces a crystal clear PDF while also maintaining any internal and external links in the original file. My only gripe is the advertisement that appears on the application’s dialog box when you print. It’s a minor annoyance, though I can’t begrudge software developers from trying to make a living with their other products.

Like PrimoPDF, PDFCreator is installed as a printer driver. While PDFCreator works right out of the box, you can configure it to output nicer PDFs. You can, for example, make sure that your PDFs can be viewed in all PDF readers, set the resolution, and ensure that the PDF opens as quickly as possible when its posted on the Web.

You can also configure PDFCreator to compress the file, and to include all or just some of the fonts on your computer in the document.

When you “print” to a PDF file, a dialog box appears. Here you can add information about the file: title, author, the date on which it was created, and keywords. This dialog box also contains two other buttons: one to override any options that you have set, and another for emailing the PDF. Click Save. Unless you’re working with a large document, you should have a PDF file within a few seconds.

If you have a home or small office network, you can install PDFCreator on a server. Anyone using the network can get access to PDFCreator and create PDFs without installing the software. I’ve used PDFCreator in this way over a few small wireless networks and have never had a problem. You do, however, need to have the PDFCreator program running on the server for this work. Many Windows users do work in Microsoft Office. But its free rival, OpenOffice.org, can do just about anything Office can. And it sports an excellent, integrated PDF writer. The PDF writer works with all of the applications that make up the OpenOffice.org suite -- word processor, spreadsheet, presentation program, and drawing package.

There are two ways to create a PDF in OpenOffice.org: quick and dirty, and with more options. To get the quick and dirty PDF, just click the Export Directly as PDF icon on the toolbar. You’ll be asked where you want the PDF saved. Choose the directory and click Save. After a few seconds, you get a PDF. It’s nothing special, though—links are lost and the file is rather large.

The second option gives you more control over the PDF.Choose File > Export as PDF. Again, you’ll be asked where you want the PDF saved. Choose the directory and click Save. Then, the PDF Options dialog box appears.

The options you can set include how you want the PDF compressed so it’s smaller, the security settings, the page layout when the file is viewed in a PDF reader, and more. Once you’ve selected the options, click Export. A document created this way doesn’t look too bad.

Acrobat doesn’t just create PDFs. What makes Acrobat useful is its ability to manipulate PDFs. How? By adding or deleting pages, inserting text, rotating pages, and more. Depending on your needs, you can find tools that do the same job at a fraction of the cost or for nothing.

Say you’ve created a document in your favorite word processor, and a nice cover for it in a drawing tool. How do you pull them together? Using PDF Split and Merge. As its name states, this software can combine and break apart PDF files. It’s easy to use -- you just tell PDF Split and Merge what files you want to work with, give the combined file a name, and click the Run button. Unlike some software (free or not) for combining PDF files, PDF Split and Merge retains internal and external links, as well as any bookmarks in the files.

PDFTK (pdftk) is a powerful tool for fiddling with PDF files. It can combine and split PDFs, add security to a file, attach other files (like a spreadsheet) to a PDF, repair a broken PDF, and more. Pdftk is a command line tool, which means opening a command prompt and typing a long string of confusing, hard to remember commands to get it to work. It looks something like this:


pdftk manual.pdf attach_files command_ref.html to_page 24 output user_manual.pdf

That's a lot of typing! Luckily, there’s a graphical face for pdftk called GUI for pdftk. No typing, just point and click. The GUI for pdftk isn't pretty and it only gives you access to a small subset of pdftk’s functions, but those are the ones you’re most likely to use anyway.

To edit a PDF in any other way -- like adding text or graphics, or changing colors -- you need to pay for the tool. There are a few such tools. Two of them are pdfedit995 and Foxit PDF Editor.

Pdfedit995 is free, but includes an ad that appears when it's run. Getting rid of the ad costs $9.95. Foxit PDF Editor, on the other hand, will set you back $99. As with any other software, your needs and your budget will dictate what you'll get.

In the end, though, you don't need to spend a lot of money (or any at all) to create and work with PDFs. There's a lot of free and Open Source software available on the Web that can handle whatever PDF needs you have.