Had an interesting discussion last night about software tools and then this morning I checked into an “opportunity” for passive income (I beg to differ that it was passive income because it seemed to require continual work but that is another story) using all these software tools you could purchase.
The amazing thing about it was that these tools could be found for free. For example:
Make any document into internet friendly PDF so your friend with a Mac can view it too for only $97! A savings of $150 from having to purchase Adobe Acrobat!
๐ This is good. The tools to do this are FREE! If you want a very simple tool that does what the above product says it does go to PDF995. This is a real simple PDF producer. However, for free you get ads (these may be irritating for some like me) but for $10, poof they are gone, a $87 savings over the above product!
But I am a Scrooge and can’t spend a dime but I get an even better product for it ๐ You may say that is not possible. Well, here goes:
PDFCreator
This is my preferred tool. Sorry the “home page” is not working at the moment but I took you to the project page. The current stable version is 0.8.0 and that can be downloaded following the link via the “download” in the Latest file releases section. I am using the AFPL version but the GNU version should be fine too or you can do both and when creating the PDF you can select with generator to use under Options. Probably should apply the PATCH file once the PDFCreator is installed.
Pretty simple to use though may be a little slow. Open the document that you want to convert in your document creator and then go to print but select PDFCreator instead of your normal printer. A little window pops up that you can input some document information in. If you are really into modifying, you can check out the Options. Here you can do many adjustments to the PDF but I have found the default to generally be best (though you can increase or decrease graphic resolution for your specific needs and many other tweaks).
Viola, a $97 savings over the initial product! And probably many more options and better support though I am not going to spend $97 to find out!
Please comment with comments and questions!
