Specifications

30 PC MAGAZINE NOVEMBER 6, 2007
FIRST LOOKS SOFTWARE
Adobe Acrobat 8 Standard
You can get a less expensive PDF document maker
than the highly polished Adobe Acrobat 8 Standard,
but not a better one. You don’t get all the features
of the Professional edition, such as the ability to
create fillable PDF forms, but you can create PDF
fi les directly from Microsoft Offi ce applications.
Within Acrobat, drop-down menus on a tool-
bar provide quick access to the most commonly
used features, which let you perform tasks such
as creating, combining, exporting, securing, and
com menting on PDF fi les. Some of the app’s most
impressive capabilities enable you to combine mul-
tiple PDF documents into one fi le and let you e-mail
one or more fi les in a secure package.
With scanned images from office documents
and modern books and periodic als, converting
to searchable PDF files works well. For very old
books, you’ll get better results with Nuance’s PDF
Converter 4 Professional or Abbyy’s ABBYY PDF
Transformer 2.0 Pro. Acrobat can index scanned
fi les, though, making searches lightning-fast.
Although the software can convert multipage
Web content, maintaining active form fi elds, it won’t
correctly handle button bars. And exporting PDF
fi les to Microsoft Word or other standard formats
Opening screen
leads to help
fi les and video
demos
doesn’t always produce perfect results. Still, Adobe’s
product remains the gold standard.
BullZip PDF Printer
After hours spent testing freeware PDF creators,
I kept just one: the simple, fast, straightforward Bul-
lZip PDF Printer. Print to its driver, and from the
tabbed dialog box that appears, you can specify
the security and display settings for the fi le, apply
a watermark, and append the output to another PDF
fi le. A macro capability allows fi lenames to include
information such as the date, time, and username.
BullZip lets you create multiple PDF printers,
each with a different set of options. To generate
a PDF file, you simply pick a printer—most com-
peting programs require you to pick a previously
saved profile from a separate dialog, a more com-
plex process. You can also control BullZip from the
Windows command prompt, letting you automate
tasks—not so with many free or low-cost rivals.
Actual PDF creation features are minimal: You can’t,
for example, translate Microsoft Word comments
into PDF annotation. For features like that, try one
of the other packages reviewed here. But you get
high-quality output and an effi cient program with
a no-fuss interface.
Adobe Acrobat 8 Standard
$299 direct; upgrade, $99
llllm
PROS Flexible, feature-
packed PDF creation, editing,
commenting, import/export.
Converts Web sites to single,
multipage PDFs. Can embed
index in PDF fi les for fast searching.
CONS Some tools are hard to fi nd.
Costly. Can’t create fi llable PDF
forms. OCR module has problems
with older documents.
For more:
go.pcmag.com/acrobat8standard
A PDQ Guide to PDFs
If you need a guarantee that others will be able to read your digital docs, you need
a PDF creator. One of these four should  ll the bill—and your budget.