PDFCreator Download
PDFCreator is a Windows application which allows you to convert any type of document that you already have saved onto your computer and turn it into a PDF file. There could be many different reasons for this as we’ll explain a bit later, but PDFs (short for Portable Document Format) have very quickly become the industry standard for communicating with customers in the form of invoicing and reports. It uses a unique method of doing this, which makes it an essential program to have installed. In fact, an old project called OpenCD which rated a lot of these types of tools declared it as the best software package for creating these types of files on Windows machines.
Why PDF files?
One of the biggest benefits of using PDF files is that it makes them truly portable. Most people will write their documents using an office suite such as LibreOffice or Microsoft Office, but it’s true that not everyone will be using the same tool. This represents a big problem – if you’re saving in a proprietary format then not everyone will be able to open it, which isn’t helpful if you need to distribute to other people or to open it yourself on other computers. There are formats that have come out on top, such as the .doc file, mainly because of how popular Microsoft’s package has become but a lot of people aren’t willing to pay for the licensing. If you need it to be open by everyone, you need it to be an industry standard that can work for everyone, free of charge. This is true for PDF files – most will have a piece of software installed that can read them, some browsers such as Google Chrome can read them by default. You’ll be able to get maximum compatibility from it, even if users are using Adobe Reader to open them.
Another benefit that we like is that you can use a wide range of different elements and no matter which tool you use to create them, they’ll remain exactly the same in this type of format. All of the images and text that you used in your office suite which will be transferred exactly as it was into PDF, meaning you don’t need to make any substantial changes to your document to make it look great. It’s simple really – just use Microsoft Office or even iWork (if you’re running on Mac OS X) and then use this tool to make it into the format you want. There’s nothing else to worry about because of the way the process is done, as we’ll explain shortly.
With a lot of formats you’re fairly limited in what you can do, too. For example, .txt files can only print out text and no elements such as images can be inserted. This is an unfortunate reality that you can’t get around, but one of the benefits of PDFs is that you can import any number of interactive elements to make your reports more exciting. To give you some examples, not only can you add graphics into your documents but you can also add hyperlinks to help users visit specific webpages, you can add videos that users can watch (but will obviously increase the file size), you can even add file attachments if you want people to download external files to their computers. The great thing about this is that you have the freedom to do whatever you want, something that you wouldn’t be able to get from anywhere else.
Security is something you should always be concerned about too. You may not want your document to be the hands of everyone, you might want to make it available only for a few people. This is a tricky situation, with most types of files you won’t get any protection at all – any person with the file will be able to open it with any number of applications. Another reason for the use of this format is that you can use a variety of different security features. You can customize it to be exactly as you want. You can set a password so that only users with the correct code will be able to open it, it can’t be brute forced either because the entire file will be encrypted. You can even digitally sign it to make sure it doesn’t get into unwanted hands. It’s also secure because PDF files are safe from malware and viruses so by opening one you shouldn’t run into any problems.