Adobe .pdf files are popular as ever these days in the office environment. It is such a productivity-enhancing-tree-hugging piece of software. Not only it saves a lot of time printing and carrying paper documents, it saves a ton of trees!!

Allow me to go on tangent here a bit... As a member of the JEDEC standardization committee, I go to JEDEC conferences four times a year, and some of the most memorable moments attending those conferences were to listen to the veteran JEDEC members telling the stories of the old JEDEC days. They have told me that in the pre-Adobe era, they would each haul large suit case filled with various paper ballots to the conference to participate in the voting; companies would on average spend $100K each year just to mail the JEDEC proposals/ballots around; and the location of the quarterly JEDEC meeting MUST be close to a local Kinko’s or print shop... All those “horror stories” were due to the dependency on paper, and with the invention of Adobe Acrobat, life was much much easier. JEDEC board of directors now can freely choose exotic meeting locations, free from the Kinko’s bonding restrictions! So... partially thanks to Adobe, I will be going to Maui this Dec.! :-)

Ok, back to PDF. Although it is powerful and useful, its full version is also expensive! $300-400 depending on the version. Well, fear no more! You now can enjoy the convenience of PDF and spend... $0.00!!

There is an open-source program called PDFCreator, that allows you to generate PDF docs just as you would with the full licensed Acrobat! Download a free Adobe Acrobat Reader and install this free PDFCreator, and you are all good to go!!