doPDF

No doubt, PDF is the most popular electronic document format available nowadays. It gets more and more popular every day, be it for e-books or manuals, brochures, letters, reports and all kinds of documents.

Therefore, a PDF converter is a must-have for most PC users today. Luckily, there are free tools like doPDF that allow you to convert any printable file into a PDF document very easily.

The program installs a virtual printer in your system that creates PDF documents instead of printing in physical paper. In fact, if you open your "Devices and Printers" window, you will see doPDF together with your real printers. Thus, converting any file into PDF format is as easy as printing it, selecting doPDF as the printer. Anyway, if you prefer, you can use the "doPDF Getting Started" window to manually convert any printable file into a PDF document. In this case, you just need to select your source file and click on the "Create" button to open the "Save PDF File" dialog, which also launches when you use the virtual printer method. This dialog, in turn, allows you to select the output file name and location, the output quality (among "High quality", "Medium" and "Smallest file"), whether to embed fonts into the final PDF file, and whether to open it using your default PDF reader.

doPDF also gives you the chance to configure your output parameters through the "Printing Preferences" dialog, as you can do with any real printer. Here you can set the output paper size and orientation, the resolution (ranging from 72 to 2400 dpi) and the scale percentage. Unfortunately, with doPDF you cannot secure the resulting PDF documents by encrypting them, signing them or password-protecting them, though those functions are available in novaPDF Pro, a paid tool also published by Softland.

In a nutshell, if you just need an easy, fast and free way to convert your printable files into PDF documents, I would recommend trying doPDF, especially due to its simplicity of use. However, if you have more advanced needs, for example, related to security, you should find a more sophisticated tool.