You may ask yourself why on earth would you need a specific tool to create a PDF from an application when Windows 10 has the ability to quickly print as a PDF?

A few years ago, PDF tools were all the rage. You had to spend big bucks for Adobe’s Acrobat and Nitro to generate a document. And business users paid the price, too. For a good reason. You need a commercial-level tool to create documents suitable for a professional environment and, in particular for printed material.

If want to print leaflets, your commercial printer will request a PDF and they will often request a minimum DPI and a particular format. None of these profiles is possible from within the standard Windows PDF output. Magazine production is another step up entirely, often going to press at a staggeringly high 1200DPI. Coming from a press background, you simply will not believe how many companies sent us 72DPI web-quality images thinking they were suitable for commercial printing.

Configure your PDF output using PDFCreator 3

The solution is a tool such as PDFCreator 3, which has just received a major upgrade. At a basic level, it simply installs a printer driver to your Windows applications enabling you to choose “PDFCreator” as your output device. However, this is where the comparison ends. The next step is to create your PDF from one of the many preset profiles. A profile is where you’ve configured PDFCreator to output your document with a certain PDF format, whether the images should be of a particular DPI, the level of compression applied to the document and the quality of the embedded images.

In addition, you can choose the metadata for your document (author, subject, keywords), add a cover, set up encryption and security for the file and even automatically output to your cloud storage.

All this for free, for personal or commercial use. Impressive. You also receive a trial version of PDF Architect which you can use to perform some post-production PDF enhancements such as reviewing the content, adding/removing pages and more. If you want more, or you’re intending to use PDFCreator long term, the Plus option offers free support, whilst the Business edition (€14.95 per seat) is aimed at a networked environment.

Download PDFCreator 3 right now.