Free PDF converter programs
For those of you who have come to this page in order to print your own e-book, you might want to first read my article on How to publish your own electronic book. At this point in time, PDF (Portable Document Format) is essentially the only accepted format for electronic books. This page provides a list of programs that allow you to convert your documents to the PDF format.
If you On Windows, this is generally done by installing a virtual PDF printer driver into your system. This allows you to create your PDF document using any program you want (like Microsoft Word) and print to the driver with that program. The printer driver will then convert your output into a PDF file and allow you to save it somewhere.
By far the most popular PDF converter is Adobe Acrobat Professional. If you want the best program, everyone will tell you that Acrobat is what you want, so I won’t go into any details here. But Acrobat is very expensive, which is probably why you are here in the first place. How expensive is it? Try $449.00. Ouch!
If you want a cheaper (but not free) alternative, you might want to check out Nuance PDF Converter Professional, or NovaPDF.
Free PDF Creators, Converters and Virtual Printer Drivers
PDFCreator – for Windows
PDFCreator is a Windows program that allows you to create PDF files from any program that can print. Instead of sending the file to the printer, the driver converts it to a PDF file. It uses encryption to protect your PDF files from being opened or printed. It also allows you to merge multiple files into a single PDF file. The program is open source and is released under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
CC PDF: Free PDF Converter – for Windows
As with PDF Creator, CC PDF allows you to create PDF documents from any Windows program that can print. This program also offers the option to add a Creative Commons License page to your document, which is basically a copyright notice. It is open source and licensed under the GNU General Public License.
Bullzip Free PDF Printer – for Windows
With the Bullzip PDF Printer, you can password-protect your PDF files and encrypt it, choose the quality of the document, set the document properties, insert a watermark, superimpose documents or put them into the background, append or prepend documents, etc. In addition to PDF, it supports various graphic output types like BMP, JPEG, PCX, PNG, TIFF. You need to have a PostScript processor in order for this to work, and they can download it for you.
CutePDF Writer – Create PDF Files – for Windows
CutePDF Writer gets installed as a printer subsystem in Windows systems, so you can create PDF files from any Windows application that can send a document or file to the printer. It then converts the document into a PDF file. As with Bullzip, tt requires a converter like GhostScript to be installed. The software works on Windows 98, ME, 2000, XP, 2003 and Vista.
