PDFCreator is an excellent program to create PDF documents from almost any Windows application. It also gets installed as a printer driver so that you can select it from within any Windows application to print any document to PDF. You can use it to convert any documents into PDF. It is a free program available under GPL license.
PDFCreator can create feature-rich PDF files. It offers most of the useful features that are needed in a PDF file and you’ll not require to purchase Adobe Acrobat for this purpose. In fact, I have personally been using PDFCreator for quite some time now and I have regularly used it even for converting my large files into PDF documents. For example, recently, I used PDFCreator to prepare PDF copy of my latest 2200+ pages book being published by a leading publisher. What I liked most was that it created a flawless high-quality PDF document.
Usually, I prefer to use PDFCreator in the form of printer-driver to print/convert any document into a PDF document from within a Windows application, such as a browser or Microsoft Word. So, use the print command (or press Ctrl + P keys in most Windows applications) and then select PDFCreator as the printer to print the document as a PDF document. See the following image which displays an illustrative screen when you select PDFCreator as your printer for printing your document as PDF file:
Installation and Toolbar option:
At the time of writing these words, PDFCreator is in its stable version 0.9.8. I had earlier been using 0.9.5 version. With the later version 0.9.7 onwards, there was some controversy regarding the toolbar that was installed by PDFCreator for your Windows Internet Explorer and/or Mozilla Firefox browsers. There were complaints that this changed computer settings for the default search engine, “DNS error” page, “404 error” page, and new tab page, address bar search, etc., and moreover, all instances of “page not found – 404 errors” used to redirect to a search site that reportedly caused several problems for users. This toolbar had been criticized as being malware.
However, now PDFCreator has resolved this issue by giving you the option to unselect the Browser add-on or the toolbar at the time of installation of PDFCreator. So, if you don’t want to install the toolbar for your Internet Explorer and/or Firefox browsers, you can unselect the option while installing PDFCreator. Similarly, if you don’t want to change your default search engine, you can unselect the option of changing your default search engine while installing PDFCreator.
For example, see the following image taken during installation of PDFCreator 0.9.8 version in which you can deselect the option for setting your default search engine to Yahoo!:
Also note that the above screen displays an important notice that if you don’t want to install the PDFCreator Browser Add-on then you can unselect it on the next screen.
Now, also see the following image showing the next screen during PDFCreator installation; here, if you so wish, you can unselect the option for the “PDFCreator Browser Add On for Internet Explorer and Firefox”:
Main Features of PDFCreator:
PDFCreator has several good features, such as the following:
(1) Create PDFs from any Windows program that is able to print.
(2) You can set various security options in the PDF files created using PDFCreator. It can encrypt the PDF files using a password and protect them from being opened, printed, copied, etc. See, the following image for illustration:
(3) You can digitally sign your PDF files to authenticate that you are the author and that the PDF file has not been modified
(4) It enables you to create not only just PDF files, but also PNG, JPG, TIFF, BMP, PCX, PS, EPS files.
(5) You can send generated PDF files by email using this program.
(6) You can also generate PDF/A files for long term archives.
(7) You can merge multiple PDF files into one PDF.
(8) You can also auto-save files to folders and filenames based on tags like user name, computer name, date, time, etc.
(9) It also gives you various options for your PDF documents for printer-resolution, compression, font-embedding, colors, security, password-protection, encryption, and digital signatures, and more.
(10) It has a simple and easy to understand interface.
Overall, PDFCreator is an excellent utility for creating PDF files of high quality and free of cost.
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How can I add Chinese language into this software? Thank you.
It appears that Chinese language is already supported (both Chinese Simplified and Chinese Traditional). Please see this Translations Page on PDFCreator for more details.
Pdfcreator does not save file in Chinese characters. Is there a fix for this?