Today, one of my clients received an 'invitation' to download PDF9 which, as he put it, "appears to be a super version of Adobe".
My first reaction was that one should always be wary of downloading software unless it is known to be from a very reliable source.
"What are PDF files?"—I hear you ask
PDF (Portable Document Format) is a file format originally created by Adobe Systems to provide documents which could be read on any computer using any operating system.
To read a PDF file, all you need is the FREE Adobe Acrobat Reader which may be downloaded from the Adobe web site here Get Adobe Acrobat Reader.
Unless you wish to create PDF documents, you don't need anything else.
Creating PDF Documents
When I purchased a full version of Adobe Acrobat for about £400 several years ago, I imagined that it was some sort of full-featured word processing or desktop publishing package.
In fact, that version basically converted existing documents created by other software in a (limited) number of formats—that's not all it did but that was the essence of it's operation.
Rather than spending a similar sum of money on a 'Vista' version, I looked at the market for other PDF creation software and purchased eXpert PDF which currently costs €69 (Euro) from Visagesoft.
This works in a different way by intercepting the ‘Print’ stream from any software application and it seems to work very well—though I only have an occasional requirement for this sort of conversion.
Both Adobe (full version) and eXpert PDF can 'work in reverse' to convert from PDF to Word and some other formats..
If you only need to convert Microsoft Office documents, I notice that the 2007 version allows you to save them directly in PDF format.
To Summarise:
- You don’t need to buy any software to read PDF documents—the FREE Adobe Acrobat Reader will do the trick
- Microsoft Office 2007 documents can be saved directly in PDF format
- To convert any format to PDF, I would recommend eXpert PDF
The current version of Adobe Acrobat (full version) is 9 though a quick Google search reveals a lot of other PDF9 products—to avoid downloading malicious software, be sure to download from the Adobe website or another known secure source.
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