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These free applications don't offer all the bells and
whistles you get if you actually pay Adobe for a full version of Adobe Acrobat,
their application for creating PDFs, but for most users simply turning a Word
document or spreadsheet into a PDF for easy distribution is all they need.
It's this wide availability of the PDF technology that has
raised the industry's eyebrows over the announcement that Microsoft plans to cancel
plans to include a "Save As PDF" option from its upcoming Office 2007 Suite. It was probably this news that prompted Gorog to embark on his ill-informed blogging.
Negotiations between Microsoft and Adobe broke down over
whether Microsoft could get permission to include the Adobe technology in its
software. The exact reasons Adobe has given Microsoft for refusing are still
somewhat shrouded in mystery, but there's no doubt that competitive pressure
and a desire to protect it's existing Acrobat business plays a big role.
The competitive pressure between the two companies has been
building with Microsoft announcing earlier this year that it plans to release
software that competes directly with some of Adobe's web and print content
creation systems.
PDF has gained considerable ground over the past year or two
as more and more corporations and Government Departments have adopted the
"open" document standard.
In contrast, Microsoft has announced plans that it will
develop its own new document standard based on Web-style XML technology as a
replacement for the traditional Microsoft Word document technology. However,
both the old and the new Office document standards are completely proprietary -
a point highlighted considerably by last years bunfight between Microsoft and
the US State of Massachusetts.
Microsoft was taken off the potential supplier lists by the
State's CIO because it did not provide an Open Documents Format. Instead it was
proposed that the State would migrate all its users to OpenOffice.org a free
and Open Source office suite similar to Microsoft's Office.
Microsoft initially resited, but finally made it back into
the race when it promised to offer its Open XML document standard to a
standards organisation.
In the case of Adobe v. Microsoft on the PDF inclusion,
Adobe wanted to force Microsoft to charge customers for the PDF technology,
Microsoft says it offered instead to bundle Adobe's web content players Flash
and Shockwave with every copy of the upcoming operating system Windows Vista,
but this was not enough to allay Adobe's fears that PDF inclusion in Office
would erode its Acrobat revenues.
Instead it looks like Microsoft will offer the PDF solution
as a free download rather than bundled with the application.
Here’s a quick selection of free PDF creators from C-Net’s
Download.com. site.
PDF995
7.8s
PdfEdit995
7.7
Free
Easy PDF 2.2.1
PDF
Ghostscript Tool 2.0.3
CutePDF
Writer 2.6
PDF
ReDirect 2.1.11
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