Saturday, February 11, 2006

Alternative Software

As I've mentioned in my previous post that you need Adobe Acrobat Reader to open PDF files, I forgot to mention another free software that I use on my other computers for PDF files. It is called Foxit Reader, and it is from a company called Foxit Software. The reason why I'm mentioning this is for those paper crafters who have an old computer with less speed, cpu power, and hard drive space that can't handle Adobes' bloated and slow startups. Foxit Reader is free, it requires no installation, is less than three (3)megabytes, and the best part is that it supports all of Adobe Readers most important features.


I have also mentioned on my previous post that you will need to buy Adobe Acrobats' standard or professional edition in order to create your own PDF files, but thats going to cost you between 299 to 449 bones, another free alternative software for creating PDF files without shelling out big bucks is PDFCreator. This software installs as a printer driver in Windows and lets you specify output settings (paper size, resolution, etc.) This means that you can create PDF files from any Windows program that's capable of printing. How this works is after you've created a document from any Windows based program (Word, Photoshop, Powerpoint, etc.) you will use the Print command on that software and choose "PDFCreator" as your printer, a dialog box will show up and ask you to specify a filename and other optional information, just fill em in, click Save, and choose a location to save your file. After saving it, your document is now converted to a PDF file - easy, simple, and free.

PDFCreator - FREE - www.sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator


Note: All software programs mentioned in this post is Windows based, if you are having trouble downloading or with installation, please leave a message and I'll try to help you the best I can.