Given the general move towards electronic submission and in particular compulsory e-submission for ITRs next year, I've decided to finally bite the bullet and make much greater use of email for "proper" correspondence (which I know a lot of you have been doing for years, but not me).
At the moment only I have the full version of Adobe Acrobat in my office, so to roll it out to my 2 staff would involve a little expense (£500?); as an aside, we don't have Vista or any plans to upgrade in the imminent future.
Whilst the expense isn't too horrific, it would still grieve me to pay that much when there appear to be much cheaper pdf creators around (as long as the functionality was comparable).
So, my questions are these: Are the pdf creators comparable to Adobe Acrobat? If not, what features are missing and how key are those? Do the pdf creators create a document which can be read in all cases by Adobe Reader? I take it that pdf is not a proprietory format? Why do people buy Adobe if much cheaper products do exactly the same job? Do people who have used more than one of these pdf creators have particular favourites?
Any and all advice most welcome!
Adam Reeves
Replies (7)
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PDF995 et al
Adam
a) There are those who feel Adobe Reader is bloated and slow and buggy. It may cost nothing to purchase, but its support price is arguably high.
b) Yes, PDF995 does everything I want and more.
I save as much as possible of incoming and outgoing documents as PDF. For example, when ordering or form-filling online I print the screen to PDF as my record. Many types of web page are difficult to impossible to send to others to view - so I print to PDF and e-mail.
Perhaps "Buggy" was a little strong.
NitroPdf can sometimes crash when doing more obscure things with it.
You can download and use it for two weeks for free - I have actually bought it cos it does what I want.
Try it and see.
What features are important to you
Hi Adam. I have a couple of versions of "writer" as well as some PDF creators. What I particularly value in writer is the ability to easily insert & delete and move about individual pages in the PDF and to save multi email messages, together with their attachments, out of outlook into one PDF doc.
From time to time I also send out PDFs with notes attached to key places and will add hyperlinks to words etc.
My creators don't do this, but they create the docs for someone else to play with if necessary.
By the way, another godsend is a programme to open PDFs and convert them back to Word or Excel mine is called able2extract.
All in all, as long as it's not a fortune, I'd aim for one programme for everyone and writer does it all and more.
Try Nitro Pdf
http://www.nitropdf.com/index.asp
It seems to do all that Adobe does but at a fraction of the cost. - approx £50.
The downside is that it can be a bit buggy.
It can create forms rather well too - ideal for filling in 64/8s etc.
Many free ones out there
There are many PDF creator's out there, I have used PDF995, Primo PDF and many others. They appear as a printer and you just send them to it when you want to create PDf's
Not sure about missing features on Acrobat Creator, I think the main ones might be document tagging - ie. making sure that headers are tagged as headers. This is mainly used to pdf accessibility.
Pdf's are so popular because it is a standardised format, so it can be read by Acrobat Reader, no matter which creator you used and no matter which computer / operating system you are on. PDF is a proprietary format - it belongs to Adobe - but they have made it an open standard.
Nowadays I also use Open Office (similar to Microsoft Office but free) that has a feature to export documents as PDF's. Very useful to export invoices and proposals directly into pdfs.
BTW, do not hurry to upgrade to Vista, it's not really recommended for businesses as it is RAM hungry and has some compatibility problems with older software and hardware.
Leo
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Accountant Websmiths
Consider PDF995
Bottom line: keep one copy of full Acrobat if you feel you must; give other PDF creators PDF995 or similar; give PDF readers FoxIT or similar.
I'm happy with PDF995, more specifically the suite. Site licences (in one case of mine, for 100 users) are very cost effective.
I would like to move my users off Adobe Reader so will be trying FoxIT soon. I read good reports about it.
Yes, you may have to do a bit of tweaking to get PDF995 working as you want - but this should take a lot less effort than battling with Adobe products!
My 100-user site has one copy of full Acrobat v6 just in case (as much to prove to others that "it's not our problem" as anything). Smaller sites are happy just to have PDF995.
Hope this helps.