What is a PDF printer, and what can it do?

In connection with the rapid development of electronic exchange of documents, their universal formats have acquired special importance. In particular, this role is claimed by the well-known PDF, which is especially popular in the West.

To this day, it is used to produce electronic versions of newspapers and magazines. Its advantage is that the document can have not only text data, but also video and audio files. Thus, the user receives a truly interactive source of information.

The only problem is that there are not so many programs with which you can create such documents. Professional solutions of this kind of issues are very expensive, so that the usual user they clearly can not afford. A position can be saved by a PDF printer.

What it is?

You probably do not need to talk about the purpose of conventional printers, on which millions of documents are printed daily. In our case, we are talking about a small program that sends a document prepared in the "Word" program to a virtual "print". The output is a full-fledged PDF-document with formatting of any complexity.

What are the advantages of such "printers"?

We have already mentioned that professional programs for making documents in PDF format are very expensive. In this case, you can choose from dozens of completely free programs, the functionality of which can sometimes compete with paid counterparts.

In addition, PDF-printer allows you to create documents with very complex formatting even for beginners, as you can make in a regular text editor using all the usual methods of work. Having considered all the advantages, we will try to choose the most optimal program.

"PDFCreator"

This PDF printer is actually the de facto standard in its segment. The application is extremely compact (just over 15 MB), Russified and logical. In addition, developers do not ask for money for using their creation.

Installation before the banality is simple, because during this process you only need to poke in the "Next" button. Important! Be sure to uncheck the box that says "Yahoo" is the default search engine. In our country, the service is not very popular, and the relevance of the search raises some doubts.

How to use the program? Here, too, there is nothing complicated: after installing the application in "Word" and other text editors, the printer "PDFCreator" appears (in the print menu). If you send a document for printing, a dialog box appears in which you can configure both the name of the future file and the location of its saving.

"Adobe PDF"

The company "Adobe" is known not only for its legendary "Photoshop", but also for a bunch of other programs. One of these is a PDF printer called Adobe PDF. Has a bunch of settings, in fact is a professional tool for creating high-quality files.

As in the previous case, after installation, the printer with the same name appears in the print menu. Unfortunately, the application is paid, so that the average user can hardly be advised to use it.

"Cute PDF 2.7"

The developers of this application are much more altruistic, and therefore do not require money for their production. The size of the program is only 1.5 MB, which makes it an undoubted leader in terms of compactness.

Unfortunately, not everything is so simple, because when you install you will be asked to download the addition "Ghostscript", without which the application will not work. The size of this add-on is equal to five megabytes, so that owners of bad Internet and this time will not be able to do "little blood".

Unlike all the above options, this time you will have to do without additional dialog boxes. When you call a document for printing, you send it to the virtual PDF printer , after which you have the option to specify the directory to save.

Actually, the possibilities of the program are almost exhausted. In its defense, we can say that it provides excellent compatibility with all standards of PDF documents.

"DoPDF 6.0"

But this is our leader in the ratio of size / functionality. The installation kit takes less than one and a half "honest" megabytes (nothing else will not have to download). The dialog box is quite ascetic, but it has everything you need: editing the page size, their resolution, and the file name.

One small remark. Strangely enough, but the developers do not give information on the compatibility of formats and other technical characteristics, so to create some important documents you better use the same "PDFCreator".

Some remarks

Before installing a PDF printer, it is worthwhile to think about its need in your particular case. The fact is that most of the users will have enough add-ons for their text editors, which even without the installation of additional software allow you to create PDF documents.

This is more relevant, because among domestic users the format itself is not too popular, so it's just stupid to pay a lot of money for a professional tool.