Alternate PDF Writer

A

Azhar

Fixing stupid since 1972
Joined
Jan 9, 2001
Messages
18,877
I know I could easily Google this (and I have), but I want your general opinion of what's a good alternate PDF creator (free is always good) out there.

Adobe has been wonderful with their Acrobat products in the past, but lately they've been delving into the gray area of installing spywares on your computer (SafeCast) and causing legitimate copies not to work due to poor maintenance of their trusted license server, not to mention it's obscenely bloated and sluggish. Adobe needs to get their head of their ass and roll back to version 5.0 when it used to be good.

But enough about Adobe. Whats a good alternative? I've tried CutePDF (with Ghostscript) and it's pretty quick, but it's very lacking when it comes to customization.

And before any drama queen decides to soapbox and say "BS, your copy had to be pirated", I'd like to add that we are in the project management business. Money is not a concern.
 
For me, Office 2007 with the PDF/XPS plugin works beautifully. Can't edit them, of course, but who cares: do the editing in the original DOC(X) file and resave, simple.

As for a totally free solution, I'm not aware of anything out there that's worth even being free. There's something to be said sometimes for commercial software, and this might be one of them.

I believe Office 2003 had a "Save as PDF" plugin at one time also, but I could be wrong on that aspect.
 
Indeed, thats what I always say too. I do my editing in other softwares especially made for what I'm going after.

Who makes AutoCAD documents in even Adobe's $500 software? Use AutoCAD to make them and convert them into PDF. Same with Excel, Visio, Word, and so on.

I've been playing with the Sourgeforge recommended PDF Creator 0.9.8

The options available is astounding. I'm leaning towards them so far. PDF995 has fewer options than PDF Creator 0.9.8 but has very annoying popup webpages if you chose to continue the freeware version.
 
Azhar said:
But enough about Adobe. Whats a good alternative? I've tried CutePDF (with Ghostscript) and it's pretty quick, but it's very lacking when it comes to customization.
Click to expand...

We switched to Bluebeam and have been pretty happy so far. Works very nicely with AutoCAD, Solidworks, and Office. The PDF editor is really nice with a tablet PC.

Their reader, though, isn't as good as the latest Acrobat 8.1 reader. Adobe finally got away from bloatware and version 8.1 is pretty fast and lean
 
I only have a small budget to work with at the office so I try to use as much open source software as I can. I install PDFcreator with every single computer I deploy, and it works beautifully. Just print your document and select PDFcreator. It is very easy if you want it to be, or you can open the settings and really tweak it to your needs. I personally think it works better than the one that comes with Acrobat.
 
right, 0.9.3

I spoke from memory, which doesn't always seem to want to work ;)

Thanks for the suggestions guys. I've also tried LEADTools from http://www.eprintdriver.com which is also very deep when it comes to customizations, similar to PDFCreator.

What I like about LEADTools is the ability to convert any file to PDF without loading the file in their respective program to print.

But that one single feature doesn't justify the cost of it where everything else is the same as the free PDFCreator. It won't kill anyone to spend 5 seconds to open the documents in their respective programs to print to PDF lol
 
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