PDFCreator 5.2.1 Build 59217

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14 March 2024, 11:08

Create PDF files from any application with PDFCreator. And the best: PDFCreator can be used by everybody for free.

PDFCreator is a free PDF converter tool that allows you to create a PDF file (Portable Document Format) from any Windows program. If you can print your document, you can convert it to PDF with PDFCreator. And not only PDF, you can convert the document to other popular formats as well, like PNG, JPEG and TIF. Creating PDF files with PDFCreator is easy. It works as a virtual printer and can convert anything to PDF that you can print. Simply print your document to the PDFCreator printer to start the conversion. PDFCreator transforms the generic printer commands generated by programs into PDF commands and stores them in a PDF file. Use it like a printer in Word, StarCalc or any other Windows application. PDFCreator converts every printable document to PDF and many other formats.

Features

Create PDF files

If you can print your document, you can convert it to PDF with our freeware application PDFCreator. And not only PDF, you can convert the document to other popular formats as well, like PNG, JPEG and TIF.

Secure your PDFs

PDFCreator allows to secure your documents against unauthorized access or modifications. You can restrict access to your PDFs, require a password to open the document or restrict printing and modifying your document with 128 bit AES encryption.

Digital signatures

If you need to sign a document and send it across the globe, it takes a lot of time. You can use digital signatures to speed up this process: Sign the document digitally with PDFCreator. This verifies you as author and you won’t have to print and scan the document.

Archive-ready with PDF/A

Today most people and companies want to archive documents for years or decades and you have to make sure that they will be readable when you need them. The PDF/A standard ensures this by applying strict standards on what can and must be included in the PDF. PDFCreator is able to create PDF/A files for your archiving needs.

Use Profiles for easy access

If you have different cases in which you use PDFCreator, you might need different settings for each. PDFCreator has profiles for this. You can create a profile for every situation and have it available with one click. You can also have multiple PDFCreator printers and define which profile will be preselected for you.

Automatic saving

Auto-save allows you to have a fully automated PDF printer. You activate auto-save in your profile and select where the files will be saved. Every document you print will be saved automatically. Combine it with tokens and it becomes even more powerful.

Tokens

PDFCreator supports tokens in many places. These tokens are placeholders for certain values, i.e. today’s date, your user name or a counter that increases with every time you print a document.

Merge and rearrange

Instead of converting your PDFs one by one, you can also collect multiple documents, rearrange their order and merge them. You will then receive a PDF that contains all your documents in a single file.

Actions

Actions allow you to go even further. You can add cover pages to your document, upload your files via FTP, send an E-Mail or even call your own custom script to further process the files.

COM interface

PDFCreator comes with a COM interface that allows you to control it from your application or script. You can wait for a print job, define where it will be saved, merge it with other print jobs and much more. As far as we know, we are the only PDF converter freeware that allows you to go this far.

Multilingual

PDFCreator is available in many different languages as we have a large community of translators. If your language should be not available, you might consider becoming a translator. Go to translate.pdfforge.org and translate PDFCreator to your language.

Free and OpenSource

PDFCreator is and will remain freeware. And even more: It is open source. You may download the code, modify it and create your own application from it, as long as you grant your users the same rights you have received. If you want to dig into this, check out our license page.

PDF Editor on board

Even though PDFCreator is about converting documents to PDF, most users will come to a point where they have a PDF and want to modify it. If you like, you can install our PDF Editor – PDF Architect – along with PDFCreator to increase functionality. It allows you to read the PDFs and start modifying it for free. You can delete pages, rotate them or merge multiple PDFs. If you still need more, you can buy modules to increase the functionality like converting PDF to Word, edit text and images or use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to convert scanned pages to editable text.

Screenshots