You probably need to print your files to PDF format sometimes. You can use Adobe Acrobat for this purpose, but it costs some significant amount of money. If your requirements are not to strong, you can use free open source version named
PDFCreator.
PDFCreator is a free tool to create PDF files from nearly any Windows application. Real PDFCreator Web site is: http://www.pdfforge.org/products/pdfcreator. I have been using it for quite some time (as per trusted friend recomendation) and it is really good tool. Easy to use and pretty fast, it satisfies most of my needs regarding creating PDF files i.e. printing to PDF from various programs which I use.
But there are some impostors on the Internet. Wikipedia article about PDFCreator says:
PDFCreator’s popularity, achieved through word of mouth advertising, has motivated other commercial software vendors to try to fool people who are looking for the free software PDFCreator to purchase their own commercial software version instead, by using a similarly spelled name to “PDFCreator”.
Such attempts include Capsoft’s USD$57.95 PDF Creator and WCCL’s USD$24.95 PDF-Creator.
I will not put that links here as I don’t want to give them any additional PR, but names of domains are carefully chosen so you can easily be mistaken. Actually, this may be considered as kind of scam and phishing. Not exactly according to classic definition of phishing scam but using some of its principles.
I was tricked by CapSoft recently. It’s funny how it happened. New computer required many things to be installed and set up. As I didn’t have the appropriate PDFCreator version saved on my disc, I did brief research on the Internet, I found it (I thought it was appropriate one), and downloaded it, and… Previously, I spent a lot of time installing, transferring data from old machine, setting up, and I was pretty tired. In those circumstances, I missed to check if that version and the PDF website, which I easily googled, was the appropriate one. I spotted that Web site looks a strange, but I thought they changed it since previous time I downloaded PDFCreator. They required e-mail address to send link for download, what was first bad sign. Link, which I received on e-mail, lead to download.com Web site, using redirection over some aweber.com domain. Unfortunately, I wasn’t to carefull, downloaded, installed that PDF Creator and started to use it. Soon, I got e-mail from them. Erhm… I can’t remember that for “old version” (actually right one), I was ever asked for my e-mail address neither I received any mails from them. And I received more mails, almost every 2-3 days one new mail. Needless to say that user interface is different, behavior is slightly different but I persuaded myself that it is because of newer version.
Suddenly, 14 days after installation it stopped to work as trial period passed and tool offered “Buy now” in message. I hit it and fortunately that button didn’t work somehow. Then, I inspected carefully information on CapsSoft and their version of PDF Creator and found out many complaints on net and also Wikipedia article which I cited above. McAfee Site Advisor also has got discussion about this. After this I inspected my machine for viruses, spyware, rootkits. I still have to check more thoroughly is there any malicious code that I might have got by installing wrong PDF Creator (with space between PDF and Creator in difference to PDFCreator without that space). Just to note that also, their wrong web site has www-pdfcreator in its domain name what is intentionally chosen to trick people. There is no “About us” section on their Web site, neither any phone that you can call nor physical address, apart from PO Box. Etc… etc… It looks like very suspicious company.
My advice is to be careful, very careful when downloading open source software, as many impostors use well known names and its variations to trick people and then to take money.
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