PDFCreator
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
| PDFCreator | |
 PDFCreator screenshot |
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| Developer: | pdfforge |
|---|---|
| Latest release: | 0.9.3 / August 25, 2006 |
| OS: | Microsoft Windows |
| Available language(s): | Multilingual |
| Use: | PDF writer |
| License: | GPL |
| Website: | PDFCreator |
PDFCreator is an application for converting documents into Portable Document Format (PDF) format on Microsoft Windows operating system. Once installed, it allows the user to select PDFCreator as their printer, allowing almost any application to print to PDF.
It is GPL-licensed Free Software, written in Microsoft Visual Basic, and depends on a few proprietary Windows components, like HTML Help and Windows Printer Drivers, which practically makes it only available for Microsoft Windows environments. The actual PDF generation is handled by Ghostscript.
Besides being installed as a printer driver, PDFCreator can be associated with .ps files to manually convert PostScript to PDF format.
TheOpenCD project has chosen PDFCreator as the best of its FOSS breed for creating PDF files in Windows.
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[edit] Document protection
PDF creator allows you to disable printing, copying of text or images and modifying the original document. You can choose between two kinds of passwords, user and owner, to protect PDF files in several ways. The former is required to open the PDF file, while the latter is necessary in order to change permissions and password. Encryption varies from 40bits, compatible with Adobe Acrobat 3.0 or 4.0, to 128 bits for Acrobat 5.0 or higher.
[edit] Other features
Through the program window pane (go to Printer and click on option) you can change the font, the character set and size the software uses to create PDFs. Moreover in the same window you will also find the format pane to personalize the level of compression for PDFs or all the other supported image formats.
[edit] PDFCreator tricks
In order to create a single, combined PDF document from different programs (provided they have a file print functionality): submit the first page to PDFCreator as the printer. When the information screen appears, select Waiting instead of Save. This will put the file into a queue. Repeat this for all additional files to be merged (the order of the final document is dependent on the order of the files). Once all files are in the queue, select them all, and Menu > Document > Combine (Ctrl+C). After combining the files, go to Menu > Document > Print (Ctrl+P) to edit the information and save the resulting PDF file.
