We regularly drone on about the merits of pdfFactory Pro as an alternative to Adobe Acrobat for creating PDFs, but this is really the first time we've been compelled to write about it.  As many of you already know, we 'discovered it' while researching alternatives to create PDFs from the latest version of EngineRoom.

Not only is it a low cost and excellent quality alternative to the ubiquitous Acrobat (at roughly £50 per licence for corporates and an astonishing £12 for education bodies), but we believe in most respects it does a better job.   It's a stand-alone PDF creation tool, meaning you can use if for any windows application, not just EngineRoom.   pdfFactory Pro gives you a very useful preview window as it builds the PDF, you can add multiple documents from multiple applications to this open preview window before creating your final file.

Changing the order and adding blank pages is done in a quick click, and best of all - you can preset all your favourite PDF settings (such as default magnification, security, etc) in the print defaults so that all PDFs created thereafter conform to those settings.   This is fantastic because you normally have to do of all this after creating each PDF with Acrobat.

We like pdfFactory so much that we built support for it (along with Acrobat of course) into EngineRoom and we're quite happy to answer questions on it.   We don't sell it directly and nor do we receive any incentive for recommending it.   You can get detailed information and download a full function trial version at www.fineprint.com, or contact their UK vendors Software Partners Ltd on +44 (0)1926 842998 or sales@software-partners.co.uk.

Attached to this article is a useful brochure from the manufacturers that's worth reading - along with some information on its equally clever 'sister' program, Fineprint.   In this day and age of credit crunches, global warming and general doom and gloom, both would seem to be products for our time with a strong green benefits message.