Quickly Print ANYTHING to a PDF!
Have you ever needed to send a file to a friend or a colleague only to find that they cannot open it? Or have you ever had to print a file on a public computer such as in a college library, then only to find that the computer does not have the program you need to read the file? With very specific software (AutoCAD for example) that only a handful of people use you might find it difficult to print your document from somewhere else. What if you could print the document to a universal format? Say like a Portable Document Format or better known as a PDF file? This article will show you how to quickly, and easily print ANYTHING you want to a PDF file!
Printing to a PDF is, surprisingly, a very simple process. First we will need to install a piece of software that will handle all of our print jobs and the conversion to a PDF file. This article will walk you through installing PDFCreator by pdfforge.org, an open source group that makes PDF conversion software. You will need a computer running Windows XP or better, so Linux and Apple need not apply.
To start we will need to download the latest version of PDFCreator. At the time this article was published the latest version was 0.9.8 and can be downloaded here. After downloading, open the file to start the installation. You should see this screen after starting up the installer:
Click on “Next” and you will be prompted with this screen:
We want to select Standard Installation since this is for your own computer, and should be selected by default. The Server Installation is a more advanced option for creating a shared PDF printer for a network, and is outside the scope of this article.
After clicking on “Next” you will get to name your PDF printer at this screen:
The default name is PDFCreator but I usually rename my PDF Printer to Print To PDF. You can call it whatever you like to be honest. Once you have settled on a perfect name for your printer, go ahead and click on “Next”. The following screen will have a default location to install the Program Files into, and it is best to just leave that alone and click on “Next” one more time.
Please Note! The next couple of screens have important changes, so just following along carefully and make sure to check the screenshots posted.
After clicking past the folder location you will see this screen:
I highly recommend that you uncheck the marked box shown on the above picture. Most people do not like junk toolbars and other random things in their web browser. So let’s go ahead remove this extra junk now. We will need to uncheck this box here, and then click on “Next”.
You will then be prompted with this following screen. The extra toolbar in PDFCreator is a little sneaky, so we need to uncheck one more box to insure that junk toolbars are not installed along with the PDF printer. Just uncheck the box I have marked in the picture below, and then click on “Next”.
We are almost there, and just have one more screen of options to change. I prefer not to have my desktop cluttered with icons when I install new programs. New programs may also install extra links and options in your “Right Click” menu inside Windows, which can lead to even more clutter. To avoid this we will uncheck “Create a desktop icon” and “Create an entry in the Windows Explorer context menu”. Click “Next” on the “Select Additonal Tasks” screen and then “Install” after that.
At this point our work will finally be of value to us! PDFCreator will begin installing onto your computer, configuring default settings, and finally adding the PDF printer you named in a previous step to your list of printers. Once that is all done you will see this screen:
Congratulations, you have setup your PDF printer! So printing to PDF is as easy as printing to any other printer on your computer. In the example below I am printing some of my latest Differential Equations notes to a PDF file for easy reading. Just take a look at the screenshots below and it should help
Setting Print Properties, and sending print job to the PDF Printer
This will show up after sending the file to the PDF Printer. Just click "Save", and select the location for your new PDF file!
Splash Image as PDF file is created
Tada, you now have your document in a PDF file!
That is all you have to do to print to a PDF file on your computer! This is a very simple, lightweight, and straightforward method of generating PDF files from your original documents. This is great for printing at different computers, reading special files on other computers, and even e-mailing a converted document to insure that the recipient can open it and view the file without any additional software.
If you have any questions or difficulties with installation, usage, or anything else please leave a comment below!
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