Create Free PDF Files Instantly & Easily Using PDFCreator [Windows]

Adobe’s PDF (Portable Document Format) has been in the limelight ever since it came into existence in 1993. However, Adobe made it ridiculously expensive for end users to create PDF documents. While the PDF Reader was free, the creator itself was very expensive. And the story hasn’t changed one bit in all these years.
PDFCreator, however, is an open source alternative that lets you create Adobe PDF files. While it doesn’t have the advanced features contained in the latest Adobe Acrobat, it does pack enough power to deal with everyday PDF requirements easily.

How It Works

PDFCreator is an elegant piece of software and is very good at what it does. It installs a virtual printer driver, and any file which is sent to that printer, results in a PDF document.
Once sent to print, the user gets a dialog box to customize anything that he/she might want to. This dialog box also asks for the path of the final document.
Once all settings are finalized, the printer produces a spanking, sparkling new PDF file.

Create Your First PDF for Free

First of all, head over to the PDFCreator page and download the latest version. It’s larger than the average utility at 17.8MB and will take a few minutes to download.
Once downloaded, run the installer and install the application. For current purposes, select “Standard Installation” when prompted during the installation.

After the installation is completed, fire up PDFCreator from your Start Menu. You’ll be greeted with the screen shown below. This is PDFCreator’s PDF Print Monitor, and this is where you customize all the settings of your virtual PDF printer.

First of all, we are going to customize the printer so that it gives us the perfect PDF as output. Head over to“Printer > Options” to bring up the Options dialog box. This should bring up an intimidating looking dialog box with  a myriad of options for you to change. Don’t fret though, as we’ll help you get going with this guide. We’ll leave certain settings at their optimized defaults and change some others to suit our needs.

Click on the “Document” link in the left hand navigation of the Options dialog box. In the right hand side, make the following changes as per your needs:

• Use Standard Author: Check this option, and enter the text that you want to display under the author field of your PDFs. You can use certain standard tokens for this. Select the token you want from the “Add an Author-Token section“. Selecting this will auto-generate author names for you.
• Use The Current Date/Time For Creation Date: Check this to time-stamp your PDFs with the exact date/time of their creation.

Next, click on the “Save” link in the left hand navigation pane. In the right hand side, make the following changes:

• Filename: Enter some text that you’d want to be part of the filename for all your PDFs. Again, you can use Filename-Tokens to auto-generate filenames. For our example, let us leave it at the default, which is “

Finally, click the “Actions” link in the left hand navigation pane. These settings let you define any actions that you’d like the printer to perform before/after printing your document.
For example, you may want to display a pop-up message once the PDF has been printed successfully. Use the screenshot below as a reference and configure your own version similarly.

Now that you are done, click on the “Save” button and commit all your changes to memory. It’s now time to test the latest geeky addition on your computer. Just head over to any application that supports printing and give it a file to print to create PDF files for free. Make sure you select PDFCreator as the printer before you finalize the command, or else you’ll be printing to some other device. Once done, do let us know about your PDF creation experience in the comments.