Any suggestions for an easy to use free PDF maker?
Foxit?
Cute?
PDFCreater?
Others?
i've usually used CutePDF or PDF995.
I use Solid PDF Creator.
I've tried a few - anyone seen any objective comparison tests?
DoPDF for no frills, produces a very small file.
I use the freeware Tomahawk PDF+ and have for years. It really gets the job done for a freeware and there's no goofy conversion drivers or any crap like that to install. It also has it's own file format for saving your work before converting to PDF, and it can import stuff like RTF, etc.
The only thing though it really helps to also download the separately available spell checker dictionaries on its download page, then unzip everything into one tidy folder and you've got a very good PDF maker.
With Tomahawk PDF+ if you want to insert images it's best to only import lossless .bmp and let the software itself handle optimizing the images making them smaller automatically by itself - so if you have some snazzy picture in .jpg or some other lossy format save it as a bitmap before importing it into Tomahawk PDF+. If you import lossy formats like .jpg, .gif, .png they'll look good in Tomahawk PDF+, however the resulting image quality in your PDF will be horrible.
I'm gonna have a look at some of these myself, but do you guys not know how to put links into your suggestions?
With the exception of Andavari of course.
DoPDF for no frills, produces a very small file.
me too until it produced wrong character/font (xls converter) then I switched to NovaPDF, more powerful than doPDF.
abu:
I was looking for a FREE PDF creator. I just tried doPDF. It seems OK for what I need, but I'm still open to alternatives if anyone has a better one.
There's always zamzar.com. I pushed the same Word document though doPDF and zamzar, and couldn't tell the difference between the two resultant files, except that doPDF was 19k and zamzar 67k. doPDF is the easier to use though, as it's on your pc.
Don't forget if you don't want to install any PDF maker software that you can freely convert them on Media Convert - although I don't like the resulting quality of the PDF's it makes.