In connection with the rapid development of electronic document exchange, their universal formats have become particularly important. In particular, the well-known PDF, which is especially popular in the West, claims this role.
Today it is he who is used to issue electronic versions of newspapers and magazines. Its advantage is that the document can contain not only text data, but also video and audio files. Thus, the user receives a truly interactive source of information.
The only problem is that there are not many programs with which such documents can be created. Professional solutions to these kinds of issues are very expensive, so they can’t afford an ordinary user. A PDF printer can save the situation.
What it is?
You probably do not need to talk about the purpose of conventional printers, on which millions of documents are printed daily. In our case, we are talking about a small program that sends a document prepared in the Word program to virtual "print". The output is a full-fledged PDF document with formatting of any complexity.
What are the advantages of such "printers"?
We have already mentioned that professional programs for typesetting documents in PDF format are very expensive. In this case, you can choose from dozens of completely free programs, the functionality of which can sometimes compete with paid analogues.
In addition, a PDF printer allows you to create documents with very complex formatting even for beginners, since you can typeset in a regular text editor using all the usual working methods. Having considered all the available advantages, we will try to choose the most optimal program.
"PDFCreator"
This PDF printer is in fact the de facto standard in its segment. The application is extremely compact (a little over 15 MB), Russified and logical. In addition, developers do not ask for money to use their creations.
Installation to the commonplace is simple, since during this process you only need to poke the "Next" button. Important! Be sure to uncheck the box when prompted to set the default search engine to "Yahoo". In our country, the service is not very popular, and the relevance of the search raises some doubts.
How to use the program? There is also nothing complicated: after installing the application in "Word" and other text editors, the "PDFCreator" printer appears (in the print menu). If you send the document for printing, a dialog box appears in which you can configure both the name of the future file and the place to save it.
"Adobe PDF"
The Adobe company is known not only for its legendary Photoshop, but also for a bunch of other programs. One of them is a PDF printer called "Adobe PDF." It has a bunch of settings, in fact it is a professional tool for creating high quality files.
As in the previous case, after installation, the printer of the same name appears in the print menu. Unfortunately, the application is paid, so the ordinary user can hardly be advised to use it.
"Cute PDF 2.7"
The developers of this application are much more altruistic, and therefore do not require money for their products. The size of the program is only 1.5 MB, which makes it the undoubted leader in terms of compactness.
Unfortunately, not everything is so simple, because during installation you will be asked to download the "Ghostscript" add-on, without which the application will not work. The size of this add-on is equal to five megabytes, so the owners of poor Internet this time will not be able to get by with a little blood.
Unlike all the options described above, this time you will have to do without additional dialog boxes. When you call a document for printing, you send it to a virtual PDF printer , after which you have the opportunity to specify the directory for saving.
Actually, the possibilities of the program are practically exhausted on this. In her defense, it can be said that she provides excellent compatibility with all standards of PDF documents.
"doPDF 6.0"
But this is our leader in the ratio of size / functionality. The installation kit takes less than one and a half “honest” megabytes (you won’t have to download anything else). The settings dialog box is quite ascetic, but it has everything you need: editing the page size, their resolution, as well as the file name.
One small remark. Oddly enough, the developers practically do not give information on the compatibility of formats and other technical characteristics, so for creating some important documents you better use the same "PDFCreator".
Some notes
Before installing a PDF printer, you should consider its necessity in your particular case. The fact is that for most users there will be quite enough add-ons for their text editors, which even without installing additional software allow you to create PDF documents.
This is more relevant, because the format itself is not very popular among domestic users, so paying a lot of money for some kind of professional tool is simply stupid.