Printer Driver PDF

Summarize Article By: Janis Elsts

PDF (Portable Document Format) is one of the most popular and widely accepted file formats. There are several ways you could go about that - using a converter tool, a PDF-specific document editor, or printing a document to the PDF format. To print something to a PDF file, you will need to install a virtual "PDF printer". There's a number of freeware applications available - PrimoPDF, CutePDF, Pdf995 and so on. At their core, most of these are very similar - each installs a virtual printer driver that intercepts the specially formatted, printing-ready data that word processors and other applications send to the printer. The virtual printer then converts the data to the PDF format using a third party library (called Ghostscript) and saves the result in the location you specify.
So if all those print-to-pdf tools are so similar, which one should you pick? I recommend doPDF - a lightweight application that doesn't require any additional software. Unlike most other PDF converters, with doPDF you only need to download & install one program and you're set.
To create a PDF file from any document, first download and install doPDF. Then open the source file in any editor that supports printing. In Word, select "File -- Print..." to open the "Print" dialog and choose "doPDF v6" from the printer name dropdown. doPDF will ask you where you want to save the .pdf file. After the PDF has been created it will be automatically opened in your default PDF viewer.
Using a virtual PDF printer is the easiest way to convert files to PDF as it works with almost any file format. Now you've learned how to print to PDF from Word or any other application, and it probably took you less than 10 minutes - congratulations.