Windows Developer Power Tools

7.4 Printing PDF Documents with PDFCreator

You’ve written great user guides and design documents for your software, but you’d rather not deliver them in Word format. You may not want to worry about versioning issues with Word, deliver documents that can be edited in Word, or rely on your customers having access to Word. PDF files would be a great solution, but how can you create those files from Word, Excel, or other non-Office software?

PDFCreator is a great solution for this problem. PDFCreator installs as a printing device, so you can create PDF files from any application simply by printing your content. PDFCreator will even let you combine documents into one PDF file, and it gives you the ability to print to a number of different graphics formats.

PDFCreator at a Glance
Tool	PDFCreator
Version covered	0.9.2
Home page	http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator/
Power Tools page	http://www.windevpowertools.com/tools/157
Summary	Print PDF files from any application. Also supports creating other graphics formats.
License type	GPL
Online resources	Forums, mailing lists, bug tracker

Getting Started

PDFCreator relies on GhostScript as part of its printing process. GhostScript is released under two different licenses: the Aladdin Free Public License and the GNU Public License. PDFCreator is available in distributions with either version. You’ll need to read up on the differences between the two licenses ...