Create Free PDFs

My favorite? OSX. It's done this same thing since at least 10.2 (August 2002).

Since you asked about others, Paperless Printer is another free "print-to-pdf" application that is free for non-commercial use. It doesn't have some of the features PrimoPDF has, but it can convert to HTML, DOC, Excel, or JPEG/BMP images as well as PDFs.

http://www.rarefind.com/paperlessprinter/features.html

I've been using PDFCreator. got it from the open CD.
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

I prefer cutepdf: http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp

I agree with Dave. OSX is my choice. Honestly XP should have had this from the get. SP2 easily could have added this, at least.

I've had a free PDF conversion utility (pdf995, not as sophisticated as Primo above) for years now. But even before that, at a time when free PDF conversion was unheard of (?) it was made available by the most unexpected source: Intuit.

4-5 years ago they realized that most Corporate Citizen Taxpayers prepared their returns at home, using Turbotax, but wanted to print at their offices, where they had access to laser printers. The solution was to generate a PDF file of the completed return. Not that they documented this, but they actually implemented a PDF print driver, which actually stayed there forever, even if the user unistalled the Turbotax product.

So anybody who ever installed Turbotax in the past 4-5 years always had the ability to create PDF files for free, whether they knew it or not. A best kept secret? :-)

open office people!

What about Ghostscript? It's free and been around a while. Even Hyperion (Reports) supports using for generating printable reports. Anyone have comments on it?

One of the most sophisticated I've found outside Adobe is the one bundled with Serif's PagePlus DTP program. It outputs Postscript in two varieties for print-quality usage, has many security options in the PDF creator and lots more. Since the package ships here in the UK at around £49 - £99, with a full range of DTP, that's almost free.

I've been using Primo for a while. It may lack some of the features of other tools, but it's very simple, very free, and works really well. It's made by ActivePDF, who presumably give Primo away in hopes of enticing people to buy their bigger stuff. I think if I needed more features though, I'd just go with PDFCreator, previously mentioned, because it's GNU'd.

OpenOffice is, of course, a great way to go, but it won't work for everything.

Directory of free pdf convertor tools
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2005/07/convert-pdf-without-adobe-acrobat-pdf.html