February 15, 2005

Making Sure What You Write Is Read

Adobe launched the Portable Document Format many years ago as a way to standardize document management. Often times I've received Word, Excel or other files and when I open them, they are not exactly how the author intended the documents to be. The margin could be wrong, the font is not right, or other problems.

Making a document as a PDF file ensures that whoever is reading the document, is reading it as the author intended the document to look. This is why more and more you see PDF files being used for forms and all sorts of information. Viewing PDF files is easy - as Adobe provides a free PDF reader here.

Creating PDF files is also easy to do but it's hard to fine a way to create a PDF file. This feature is not built into Windows and Adobe's version costs almost $300.

The Washington Post writes Two programs, CutePDF Writer (Win 98 or newer, www.cutepdf.com) and Pdf995 (Win 95 or newer, www.pdf995.com) come in free versions intended to promote upgraded or ad-free siblings, while a third application, PDFCreator (Win 95 or newer, sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator) is an open-source project.

Another option is to use Adobe's online PDF creator tool. You can use it for free 5 times and then it costs $10 per month.

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