Bush Mackel

With all the web design work I’ve been doing, I’ve had to send out a lot of proposals and contracts lately. And since those documents have been in different formats and with different fonts and such, I’ve had to convert them all to PDF format. This hasn’t been the worst thing in the world because I have a laptop with Acrobat Pro which allows me to print any document into a PDF. Unfortunately though, I do most of my work on my desktop so constantly going back and forth between the two is becoming something of a cumbersome process.

Free PDF Conversion from Adobe.com?
Then I remembered that Adobe offers free PDF conversion online! So I went on the site, logged in with my standard user/pass, and was promptly informed that I had already used up my 5 trial conversions. *frown* So I said, “Ok, I’ll just log on as someone else,” and I went to my backup user/pass. It would seem as if I had been down this road before as I didn’t have any trial conversions left there either. I would consequently have to sign up as a new user to get another 5 but I thought to myself, “Ok, you sometimes print 5 PDFs in 5 minutes as you catch a typo after the fact… This isn’t going to work out, you use the software enough, why don’t you just buy it?”.

But to be truthful, it’s hard to justify spending $450 on a full version of Acrobat Pro just so you can print documents out to PDFs. SO, I did what I was always do when my back’s to the wall and that’s turn to the Internet! Turns out there is more than one company offering free PDF software including one who I found that provided a great solution, PrimoPDF! But the question wasn’t really if I could find a PDF converter download but instead if I could find one that rivaled Adobe’s online free PDF conversion. Otherwise, I guess I could just create new e-mails for new Adobe trials…

Your Free PDF Printer!
PrimoPDF – You gotta love their look. You got the person with the surfboard and of course the tagline, “Totally Free PDF Creation because It’s everybody’s PDF” just gives you the “screw the man” feeling right? At first I was really scratching my head as to why they would give away their stuff for free but after a bit of research it looks like PrimoPDF is apart of the ActivePDF family which DOES sell a bunch of PDF solutions. So we can all feel a bit less paranoid about the wool being pulled over our eyes. When I originally set out on my search, I really had just hoped to find some free pdf software. You know – Something that installed to my computer in Program Files that I’d fire up, load up a file and then have it convert it to a PDF. Imagine my surprise when I found that it gives you, (are you ready for this?)…

a FREE PDF PRINTER DRIVER!

For those of you who don’t understand why you should be so excited, let me break it down for you. This is the same functionality given to you when you have Adobe Acrobat Pro. When you want to convert something to a PDF, you select print so you bring up the Print dialog box and then you select “PrimoPDF” as your printer. A second or two later and you have your PDF! Ha, you know the more I write this post the more it’s sounding like I was paid to write it. But I assure you that I wasn’t, I’m honestly just excited that I don’t have to shell out “beaucoup dólares” for Acrobat and I no longer have to constantly flip between my desktop and laptop.

Same as Adobe.com?
Before I definitively looked to PrimoPDF to be my PDF converter of choice, I had to do a sample test on a flyer I had made in Publisher. So what I basically did was convert the flyer into PDF form at both Adobe.com and by using the free PDF printer driver installed on my computer by PrimoPDF. Frankly, I was shocked by the results!

The PDF I created with PrimoPDF looked better than the one created by Adobe! I attributed this to something like JPEG compression or the like so I went back in to Adobe.com, put all the settings I could on maximum and ran it again. This time I got a much better result from Adobe.com, but still not as clean as PrimoPDF! I also went ahead and printed out both PDFs (and maybe it’s just my lackluster printer), but I couldn’t see any difference between the two in print. It’s only when you’re viewing it at 200% which I’d think some people are inclined to do.

Conclusion
If you’re looking for a free pdf printer, you could do FAR worse than PrimoPDF. After electing to print your document into a PDF, a PrimoPDF dialog appears so that you can change the quality of the PDF between their custom settings, edit document properties such as authorship and also add security. The process is fast, the file sizes are comparable to PDFs created with Adobe, and their logo has a surfboard in it. What more could you ask for?