PDF Creation tools...

As any of you know that have visited my blog in the past...I am all about the FREE or Open Source goodies. So, when I discovered the various methods of making PDFs without having to use Adobe Reader I was ecstatic. Now mind you this road of PDF making has been a long one and over the years I have played with the many apps that have come and gone. However, more recently I stumbled upon two that I can't speak enough about, BullZIP and LOOP.

BullZIP is a PDF creator that substitutes as a printer...meaning that you send a print job to the BullZIP PDF Printer and BOOM you have a PDF of your document. I have found this particular tool helpful at those times that I did not have a printer handy and had to have a copy of whatever it was. It is a great utility with many features that I will list below and I highly recommend people check it out:

BULLZIP FEATURES
* Print to PDF from almost any Windows program.
* Supports 64-bit operatings systems.
* Direct output to the same file each time or prompt for destination.
* Control if the printer should ask if you want to see the resulting PDF document.
* Control output and prompts programmatically.
* Setup can run unattended.
* Graphical user interface.
* Password protect PDF documents.
* 128/40 bit encryption.
* Quality settings (screen, printer, ebook, prepress).
* Set document properties.
* Watermark text, size, rotation, and transparency.
* Supreimpose/background documents.
* Appending/prepending documents.
* User interface control.
* Command line interface to all settings.
* COM/ActiveX interface for programmatic control.
* Support for Citrix MetaFrame
* Support for Windows Terminal Server

The next PDF goodness on the list is LOOP...a Firefox plug-in that will create PDFs on the fly while you are browsing. LOOP doesn't generate the PDFs locally unfortunately, but it is in fact generated on the LOOP web servers. For those with privacy concerns this might freak you out, but I don't see the process as anything too concerning and I am paranoid about everything. You also have to enable it with a login w/ an email on their site. Worth a look anyhow!

I know I only mentioned the two...but I cannot talk about PDFs and not mention Foxit and Open Office. Foxit is the bomb of PDF readers and I highly recommend everyone go and snag that up...FREE. Also, for those of you who want to create PDFs right from your doc...or office suite...hit up Open Office...does everthing MS Office does...and then some...i.e. create PDFs.

- BullZIP
- LOOP *Amit Agarwal of Digital Inspiration also has an article on this.
- Open Office
- Foxit