Tech Advice: PDF print driver

[JeenLeen]

My office just switched to Windows 7 OS and Microsoft Office 2010. A big downside is that the license we have for Adobe Acrobat Professional (v7, I think, maybe v9) is not compatible with the new system. We don't have enough money to purchase new licenses.

Does anyone know of any good, legal, and free or inexpensive programs that allow you to 'print to' pdf, such as letting you save an e-mail as a .pdf file?


As a backup, it looks like we can 'print' to OneNote and use it for record-keeping of e-mails, but .pdfs have a cleaner look (and are what my boss wants.) Has anyone had any experiences with using OneNote for archival purposes?

[valadil]

I think I've used CutePDF as a pdf printer driver and been reasonably happy with it. IIRC the only thing I didn't like was that it asked to install some random crap along with it during installation.

[lesser_minion]

I suspect that most of the virtual print drivers out there for PDFing material have some sort of personal use only restriction on them.

Microsoft Office 2010 should be able to export directly to PDF, although that doesn't seem to apply to Outlook (you can drag your work through OneNote and then export it from there, but I would not personally regard that as convenient).

The other alternative would be XPS. A print driver for it comes bundled with Windows, and while it hasn't caught on, it's pretty much intended to serve as an alternative to PDF, so it might be useful if you're only doing this for internal use. I'm pretty sure you can use Internet Explorer to view the resulting files, and for non-Windows platforms you'll probably find that your bundled document viewer will handle them for you.

[factotum]

I agree that Word 2010 does a perfectly fine job of exporting to PDF. If it's not something that you can convert to Word first, CutePDFWriter is free and does a good job, as valadil pointed out.

[Rawhide]

Microsoft Office 2010 can, out of the box, save as a PDF. Office 2007 can do it with a free plugin.

CuetPDF is, as suggested, a very good free PDF "printer". The only problem is that no one has provided a link (http://www.cutepdf.com/products/cutepdf/writer.asp) to it!


Also, if it's Acrobat 9, it can be made to work on Windows 7 with a workaround.

[Phishfood]

+1 for CutePDF, we use that here. Other alternatives include www.openoffice.org.

[JeenLeen]

The main thing we want the printer for is e-mail. Currently we have a Novell e-mail system, but we're shifting to Outlook soon.

Has anyone had any experiences with DeskPDF (http://www.docudesk.com/deskPDF_PDF_Writer_LP6.shtml) or Bullzip's PDF printer (http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php)?
The former is cheap but not free, while the later looks to be free even for professional use as long as less than ten folk use it.

+1 for CutePDF, we use that here. Other alternatives include www.openoffice.org.

I looked over OpenOffice (and have used it before), but I didn't see a .pdf-based program. Does OpenOffice let you save stuff as pdf or is it a program in its suite?

EDIT
I think I've used CutePDF as a pdf printer driver and been reasonably happy with it. IIRC the only thing I didn't like was that it asked to install some random crap along with it during installation.
You were able to say no to these extra installations? If you have to install them, are any of them problematic?

[valadil]

You were able to say no to these extra installations? If you have to install them, are any of them problematic?

If I had to install anything extra I wouldn't have recommended the software ;-)

[JeenLeen]

A related question: I was asked to look into a free or at least cheap program that not only lets you print to PDF but also lets you isolate an individual or group of pages in a pdf and create a new one (like how Adobe Acrobat lets you do).

Does anyone know of such? Do the programs I've linked to before (see spoiler) do so?

Has anyone had any experiences with DeskPDF (http://www.docudesk.com/deskPDF_PDF_Writer_LP6.shtml) or Bullzip's PDF printer (http://www.bullzip.com/products/pdf/info.php)?
The former is cheap but not free, while the later looks to be free even for professional use as long as less than ten folk use it.

[Phishfood]

I looked over OpenOffice (and have used it before), but I didn't see a .pdf-based program. Does OpenOffice let you save stuff as pdf or is it a program in its suite?


Its just in the file menu - export as PDF. It was added in...umm 2.7? I cant remember.

[The_Ditto]

I like this one myself:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

It's got the right price tag: $0

Opensource, good for corporate .. no issues ...

Nothing fancy like bookmarks and such, unfortunately, but it does the required "store this file as a PDF" quite nicely ..
:smallsmile:

[lesser_minion]

A related question: I was asked to look into a free or at least cheap program that not only lets you print to PDF but also lets you isolate an individual or group of pages in a pdf and create a new one (like how Adobe Acrobat lets you do)

Does anyone know of such? Do the programs I've linked to before (see spoiler) do so?

Technically yes: you should be able to send individual pages of a PDF file back to the PDF creator by printing them from your PDF reader. What you seem to be looking for is a PDF editor, which is something else.

True PDF editors do exist, and they do make that process a little easier, but I'm not sure there are any good* free ones. In the US, the going rate seems to be about $100/license.

* LibreOffice/OpenOffice Draw can edit PDF files with an extension, but I'm not sure how effective it is.