Many of my customers have a need for creating PDF documents.  Most of them don’t need anything fancy and are usually on a tight budget.  If they aren’t, I recommend purchasing Acrobat from Adobe.  That is Acrobat, not Acrobat Reader.   And of course, they have muddied the waters from there, there are three versions, Standard, Pro, and Pro Extended.

How about a FREE solution though. Those solutions are my favorite.  If you don’t need any of the extra features, then PDFCreator may be the solution for you.  It is open source, so it is spyware free, but keep reading before installing.

It can be downloaded at: http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

1) Go to the link, click on the bar that says “Download PDFCreator” (currently it is a green button)

2) On the next screen, click on the “Download” button on the same line as “PDFCreator” package.

3) On the next screen, click on the “PDFCreator-X_X_X_setup.exe” link; note – the x’s represent numbers, example the current version is 0.9.5 so the file name would be PDFCreator-0_9_5_setup.exe.

4) The file should be downloaded now.  Run the downloaded file

5) Normally, the next few screens will act like this (the following is for version 0.9.5):

Click Next ->
Accept the agreement, Next ->
Standard Install -> Next
Name for the printer -> Next
Folder location -> Next
PDF Creator Toolbar ->  STOP! Read the following note, then watch on the next screen

NOTE: The installation will automatically want to install a PDF toolbar.  I would opt out of this option. I don’t think extra toolbars do anything but slow down your system and web browsing.

The next screen will have you select the Components, uncheck PDF Creator Toolbar…

Click Next and continue following the directions on the screen.

It is installed, what now?

So you have it installed, how do you use it, your ask? When PDFCreator was installed, it installed itself as a printer.  Anything you can print, you can create a PDF.   Open the program where your document is, Select your File menu, then Print, then look for a PDFCreator Printer.  When you print to a PDF, the printer will pop up and ask you to save the PDF to a location.  I recommend the Desktop or My Documents.

That it is.

pardon my ranting…

Recently a friend’s computer was reloaded with a clean copy of Windows XP Media edition. After which, a visit to Microsoft’s web site for updates is recommended. There were 91 critical patches, um, I mean updates.

After installing them, and a reboot, which I won’t fault Windows for, even Macs normally reboot after updates, there were 5 new critical patches updates. So either 5 updates didn’t take or there were 5 new ones, were required to patch the patches or update the updates, however you want to look at it?

Next was the Software “Optional” updates. These updates include root certification, Windows Media player updates, .net, etc. There were 8 of them. Not a big deal, but right after I installed these 8 updates, reboot, rerun of windows updates, and there are now 9 critical updates again?

Does this make sense to anyone? (yes sarcasm) And who has done this, a clean install of an OS, and would LOVE Bill Gates to sit down at a computer and do it himself, and see how time consuming and what a pain a clean install is?

A side note, the reason for the clean installation was a week’s worth of trying to remove spyware, not thanks to Microsoft’s security lacking software had infected the computer beyond repair.

Thanks for reading this rant… please return to your regular scheduled program 🙂