PDF

PortableApps offers fully functional, fully portable versions of popular open source software. Its Sumatra PDF Portable is a lightweight version of the PDF file viewer. It's small enough to fit on just about any mobile device or storage medium, giving you the option of viewing PDF files on the go. As a portable application, it will run on any compatible Windows machine without installation and without leaving behind any personal information or changes to the registry.

The Sumatra PDF Portable "installer" copies the program's executable to a destination of your choice; the default destination is a … Read more

Free PDF Creator from GIRDAC InfoTechnologies is a free application that can create PDF documents from hundreds of Windows applications without requiring any Adobe software. It can create a PDF document from the Print properties of any printable file. It can handle multiple users on one system and save each user's settings for regular operation, and it displays a Conversion Report when it's done.

Free PDF Creator is essentially a printer driver that lets you save or print documents in the PDF format from the Print properties dialog of any file. However, it also has a setup interface, … Read more

Junko is a free tool that lets you split PDF files into separate documents by page range or number or combine many PDFs into larger files. By splitting large PDFs into multiple smaller files, you can work on just the pages or sections you need, and they're easier for small apps to handle. Combining multiple PDFs is useful for creating manuals and other multipage documents. Junko is powered by PDFsharp, the open-source .NET library of PDF wares.

Junko's interface is very basic and opens with a blank main view, but it's Aero-compatible and has a customizable toolbar. … Read more

Have you ever thought to yourself, "Man, I wish I had some way to save this Web page as a PDF so I could print it and take it with me"? Printing a Web page directly often leads to incorrect formatting or a loss of content. But saving a Web page as a PDF typically captures the page as it looks in a Web browser, which ensures that the printed version looks the way it's supposed to. HTML to PDF Converter let users do exactly that, quickly converting both HTML files and URLs to PDF files.

The … Read more

For many people, Windows Explorer and its hierarchical folders work well enough for organizing documents. Those who regularly deal with large quantities of documents, however, may find that they need a means of organizing files that's a little more robust. Benubird PDF is a unique program that lets users organize PDFs and other files into collections that are easy to navigate and work with.

Our first question about Benubird PDF was whether its collections simply linked to the original documents on our hard drive or created new copies that it stored within its own directory. We were concerned about … Read more

Adobe today announced the latest version of its Acrobat suite of products.

Set to hit the market in the next 30 days, the new Reader X and Acrobat X products are promising tighter security, better collaboration, and easier PDF reading.

The free Adobe Reader X will offer a new Protected Mode to sandbox, or isolate, JavaScript code, 3D rendering, and image parsing in order to better secure PDFs. Adobe has seen an increasing number of security holes in its PDF technology over the past few years, creating trouble for the many people who use the ubiquitous file format. The company … Read more

PDF files are a part of just about everybody's life now, but many people don't have applications that are capable of doing much with these files besides viewing them. Quick PDF Tools is a small suite of utilities that lets users do more with their PDF files than just look at them. It's not the most feature-filled program we've ever seen, but it's not a bad choice if you're looking to perform a few basic tasks with your PDFs.

The program appears in the Windows context menu, so all you have to do is … Read more

WinPDF from PDFDesk Informatique is a free tool for creating PDF documents via the Print properties. It installs a virtual printer on your system that you select via the Print command. It saves documents as PDFs in a directory of your choosing, or it can print them out as PDFs. It can convert other documents to PDFs, too. Though it's a free solution for creating PDFs, it adds a watermark on output, limiting its appeal.

Installing WinPDF adds the Easy PDF Creator printer software to your Printers directory, and you can access it like your system's other real … Read more

The WinPenPack project focuses on making popular open-source software portable, and X-Scribus is part of their X-Software Collection of portable open-source freeware. It's a fully portable version of Scribus, the page layout software. Like the installed version, X-Scribus supports professional standards and top-quality features, including CMYK, ICC, and spot color and commercial-grade PDFs.

X-Scribus opens with its main interface as well as its tabbed New Document dialog, which also lets you open existing and recent documents as well as quickly configure new documents with up to four folds. We created a basic, letter-size, single-page document, which opened in a … Read more