PDFCreator - Create PDFs from any application that can print.

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Summary: PDF files are a convenient and easy way to save documents for viewing almost anywhere. If you can print a document, you can create a PDF of it.

About 6 months ago, perhaps more, I decided to go as paperless as I could. My prior recommendation of the ScanSnap document scanner was a big part of that and allowed me to empty three drawers of my four-drawer file cabinet, saving documents digitally instead.

Once you're in the habit of creating PDFs from paper documents, the ease with which PDFs can be used, saved and perhaps most importantly - backed up - becomes readily apparent.

As a result I've also cut down on the amount of actual printing I do by changing my default printer to the free PDF Creator virtual printer.

It's not at all uncommon to want to save something, say a sales receipt from an on-line purchase, by printing it. But it's rare that you actually need to save it on paper. Instead, I print to the PDF Creator printer which creates a PDF of the printed output that I save on my computer. If I need to actually print it to paper, either now or sometime in the future, I can simply load up that PDF in a viewer such as Acrobat or Foxit, and print to my real printer from there.

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Here you can see the printers I have installed on my laptop running Windows Vista:

While you can see that there is a "real" printer installed for when I need it, the default printer is PDFCreator.

Now, when I print - say a web page I'm viewing in Firefox, the print dialog first shows me that PDFCreator is the printer:

Once I actually press OK to print, PDFCreator takes over and after a moment presents me with a dialog that allows me to specify additional information about the PDF it's creating:

Here, if you like, you can specify the title of the document, the author as well as additional characteristics of the PDF that's being created. To be totally honest, I completely ignore this dialog 99% of the time and just press Save.

Pressing Save, of course, causes the Save dialog to appear so you can specify the location and filename of the final PDF:

By default, PDFCreator then automatically opens the newly created PDF document in your default PDF reader:

It's as simple as that. And the beauty is that any document that you can print you can print to PDF. Save receipts, archive email, collect web pages for research, share whatever you find ... whatever you can think of, PDFCreator might well be a useful and tree-saving tool.

I recommend it.

Warning: PDFCreator does, indeed, do something on installation that I've written about before that annoys me deeply: by default it installs an additional toolbar. This can be avoided, but you must pay close attention during the installation process. Make sure to select the "Custom" install, and then make sure to deselect any option that references a toolbar. In a recent install I noted that this needed to be done on at least two separate screens in the installation wizard.

Related:

• Just what is PDF format, how do I view it, and why do people use it? PDF format allows documents to be viewed across many different types of computers and operating systems, and look the same everywhere.

• How do I convert a Word document into a PDF file? PDF, or Portable Document Format, is a common format for sharing documents. Turning your Word document into a PDF can be as simple as printing.

• Why don't PDF's print at the same size as the original? When a PDF is printed, even though it may be standard sized pages, the printer may add margins. You can adjust this behavior when you print.

Article C3728 - May 10, 2009