If cutbacks have hit your office's budget — or you're working at home and can't afford to spring for Acrobat at the moment — there are alternatives to get you by.
Even good old Adobe Systems Inc. isn't immune to the
economic crisis. It announced
declining profits last week but also provided a less-dour outlook for the
second quarter that gave its stock a shot in the arm.
If your little corner of the economy depends on PDF
documents to keep productive, but the people holding the purse strings won't
shake loose the $699 Adobe charges for the full-boat Acrobat 9 Extended Pro,
here are some other ways of getting your PDFs done:
1. PrimoPDF: Nitro
PDF acquired this free PDF-maker from activePDF earlier this month. The company
launched a free PDF-to-Microsoft-Word
conversion site to go with Primo, and also offers an online conversion service
called PrimoOnline.
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2. OpenOffice: As
Linux gains momentum in the marketplace and more people run it on their
desktops and laptops, the open-source office applications suite gets more and
more stable. And it outputs to PDF, too.
3. Google Docs: Seemingly
in perpetual beta, this Web word processor can take in Word files and output to
PDF. Great for resumes and all kinds of office-document applications.
4. PDF
Creator: A free Windows print-driver tool, PDF Creator also does document
merge.
5. Nitro PDF: This
commercial app ($99) is more stable than the free ones — and much more
feature-laden, covering most of the functions the average office worker needs for
PDF documents — and costs a lot less than Acrobat.
6. JAws PDF: Global
Graphics offers several under-$100 choices for desktop PDF creation, just as
Nitro does. Based on the Harlequin RIP, it has been the best-known, longest
running Acrobat alternative on the market.
7. CutePDF: CutePDF
Writer is free. Make all the PDFs you want. Need more functionality? The
developer also offers a $50 "pro" version that adds features such as
watermarking, split/merge, and digital signatures.
9. PDF995: Over the
years, this free ad-driven application has added so many features (like
automatically generated document tables of contents) that, if you can live the
commercial messages it's a pretty powerful little app for the price.
10. Mac OS: It's an oldie but goodie. If you run a Macintosh
or someone close by does, Apple built PDF export right into OS X's print
driver. If you know your way around the settings menus, it's possible to get
fairly fine control of document settings.
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