For the most part we can agree that PDF documents come in very handy at times, they’re easy to read and content effective. However, if reading a PDF comes easy to us, shouldn’t it be just as easy to create one?
That’s where doPDF shifts into place. This free PDF converter not only rescues you from having a hole drilled into your pocket where loose change starts to seep out but it also saves you a whole lot of productivity time as well.
Here’s How to Get Started
doPDF is extremely simple to use so if you don’t have a lot of patience with 3rd party applications fear no more because you’ll have a smooth time with this software.
First you need to download this app. Once you’ve installed the application just open up a document in Microsoft Word, NotePad, WordPad or pretty much any other text editing software. I’m going to use Microsoft Word for the sake of this tutorial.
Next you have to go to File-> Print-> doPDF.
Now you just have to click OK and a small window will pop-up asking you where you’d like to save your new PDF document, once you’ve chosen your preferred location then click OK once again.
And you’re finished, it’s as easy as that! With these few steps you’ve just created a high quality PDF document.
Before the conversion:
After the conversion:
Conclusion:
The entire process from begining to end shouldn’t take more than a few minutes to complete. It is possible that as doPDF converts a document the file can suffer from minor unusually formatted images or texts, however for the most part doPDF is pretty accurate.
At the moment there’s no option to print web pages (for example: news articles or pages off a forum) that automatically divide into separate pages, thus you’ll most likely end up with lines that divide the article or page throughout your PDF document, if you decide to print directly from the web.
Another quick issue I discovered was the size of the file doPDF creates. The size of the document can be a bit large and sometimes daunting depending on how many images a page may contain, though if you can manage to use WinZip or a free similar app to ZIP the file up, it shouldn’t be much of an issue.
Please feel free to MakeUseOf the comment box below and leave us your thoughts. What similar apps do you use?
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I’ve tried a few, but always come back to CutePDF Writer (free):
http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp
I use pdfFactory, it’s more complete, fast, and the resulting pdf’s are smaller.
This seems to be a very useful app, But if you are using Word 2007 there’s and add-on called ‘Save as PDF’ for the whole Microsoft Office 2007 suite. So, you can save all your documents (on Excel, Word and even Powerpoint)as a pdf file.
Here’s the shortened link for this add-on:
http://tinyurl.com/y39ave
Cheers!
Thanks for your helpful additions! I will be sure to take a look at a few of the above mentioned apps.. :)
PrimoPDF is THE best PDF converter, allows you to save for screen, print, ebook, prepress and custom so you can control the size and quality and password protect them and more. Converts 300-plus file types.
I totally agree. I have tried a number of PDF converters and PrimoPDF is by far the best.
Another vote here for PrimoPDF. Cyndi already said all the good stuff. :)
PrimoPDF is pretty good, I’ve tried it and I like it. The quality of the conversions are great. But, it wouldn’t hurt to try both and choose on that you might like.. :)
I like pdf24…never had a problem.
The post on dopdf is already posted in Makeuseof http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/use-dopdf-to-convert-documents-to-pdf-for-free-windows-only/ an another post on same program.
Just in the sense of re-affirming what others have said, PrimoPDF rules the roost.
I’ve tried PrimoPDF. It has a lot of options & functions and all that, but every now & then, it would completely massacre the output (and, of course, it would always seem to happen when I needed it most).
I’ve never had that problem with CutePDF. What it may lack in bells & whistles, it more than makes up for in stability & reliability.
There’s also PrimoPDF which I’ve been using for quite a while now.. I haven’t experienced any issues with it so far.. works with all the applications.. just hit the Ctrl+P and choose the folder you want to save your PDF in.. and you’re done!
Try it out:
primopdf.com/
Cool app but there’s seems to be an issue with adding links to the document..
could be the bomb if it would support links.
That’s true, there is that issue of non-supporting links. Maybe in the future the creators of doPDF will bring the support of links to us…
I use PDFill for everything pdf related
There’s a tip here on how to reduce the size of the resulting pdf, basically the problem is that the images are not cropped before inserting them in word – http://www.dopdf.com/forum/topic/keeping-file-size-down#post-560
Thanks Claudiu! I’m sure a lot of us could use the tip, seems as though it could resolve a lot of the image resizing issues.
I use PDFCreator – http://www.pdfforge.org/ It is opensource and has useful functions (image size, passwords etc.)
Tried a few others and hate banners. I like this one.
I second the comment about PDFCreator. It has been a very stable, effective tool for me.
html2pdf is a great tool – i was looking for something like that