PDF Writer Pro

PDF Writer Pro has a 15 day free trial but the 15 days lasted only 15 seconds on my Windows 2000 machine. Try another product for your PDF conversions.

PDF files are one way to distribute printable documents online. PDF Writer Pro, from www.amicutilities.com/pdf-writer/, sounds like a good low cost way to convert any print output to PDF in Windows. Adobe Acrobat Elements and OpenOffice are the main competitors.

Acrobat Elements is disqualified by having the strange requirement to install Microsoft Internet Explorer before you can use Acrobat. I know it is hard to believe that a software supplier would make you install a totally unrelated product from a competitor but Adobe's Web site says you need Internet Explorer to use Acrobat Elements. That Internet Explorer requirement excludes Acrobat Elements from every machine I control or influence, currently over ten thousand computers, because of the gross unreliability and security problems with Internet Explorer.

PDF Writer Pro does not list Internet Explorer as a prerequisite. Unfortunately when I first tried PDF Writer Pro on a Windows 2000 machine, the expiry problem occured and I could not test PDF Writer Pro. There are at least five other products with similar specifications to PDF Writer Pro so I looked at them instead of trying to fix PDF Writer Pro. Ghostscript PDF sort of worked for the few occasions I created PDF files. Today I use OpenOffice for creating PDFs from word processing documents and a Drupal add on module for converting Web pages direct to PDF.

OpenOffice is now a mature way to create documents and has a PDF creation option. OpenOffice is a good choice for creating word processing documents that will end up as PDF files. PDF Writer Pro still has the advantage that you can create PDF files direct from applications other than word processing.

Content managements systems are adding conversion modules to convert HTML content direct to print or PDF, removing the need to have an original word processing file for conversion to PDF. I use the Drupal print and PDF output options. Good content managements systems also offer workflow and version management. I use Drupal workflow on some sites and have tried the version control. If you work only with the written word and not CAD or other applications, you could set up your whole document management online without touching PDF Writer Pro or OpenOffice.