FreePDF 2.0 - Create your PDFs for free without any advertisment !!!

Before we knew FreePDF we always used PDF995 with its nice features. But, since we know FreePDF, we only use FreePDF for creating PDFs from any application (e.g. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Internet Explorer, ...) as it has similar features and does not create any crazy advertisment, which makes PDF995 really a bit horrible if you do not pay the 9,95$.

Features:

• No advertisment
• This works similar to Adobe Acrobat
• Available in english, italian and german - can be translated into further languages from everybody, as the text files are fully available
• The size of the PDFs can be configured and is in "high quality" similar to PDF995
• Color output is supported as well - keep in mind, that Powerpoint converts itself to grayscale - so you would have to reconfigure this in the PPT printer dialog to "color"
• Full Text search with Acrobat Reader is supported as well
• Merge of several documents (even from different applications) is supported as well
• Creation of PDFs from PDFs works fine. So you can use "old PDFs" and print a part of them and create new PDFs from that
• You can define a fixed directoy for the created PDF files - so you are (currently - but in plan) not asked for a name and a directory - but this is in plan for the version 2.1

Here you can download the tool:

• Download Ghost 8.11 and FreePDF 2.0
• If the links above should be outdated, have a look at the complete homepage at http://www.shbox.de - sorry, that this homepage is in german only, but the great tool is really available in english as well!

Installation description without reading the manual:
(For Windows 2000, XP and higher only - otherwise you have to install your printer driver on your own)

• Ghost: Install the file gs811w32.exe (or higher) - We would recommend to change the installation path from "C:\gs" to "C:\Program Files\gs" in order to prevent too many directories in your root directory.
• FreePDF: Install the selfextracting zip-file freepdf2.exe on your computer. (It always uses the path "C:\Program Files\FreePDF")
  • Start the installation
  • Select the language of your choice
  • Now, use the button "Special Settings" instead of "Setup"
  • Here you use the button "Change" and select the directory, where all your created PDFs should end up - if you prefer like us to NOT have them all on the desktop
  • Finally, you use the button "Setup" for an easy and automatic setup
• Patch to version 2.01: (v 2.0 is consuming a few handles with any PDF)
  • Stop "FreePDF" in the Systray with a right mouse click and then the option "Quit the FreePDF Assistent"
  • Copy the file "FreePDFA.exe" to the directory "C:\Program Files\FreePDF" and replace the old version there
  • Restart "FreePDF" with a double click on FreePDFA.exe
• Now you should have a new printer driver in all your applications, that is called "FreePDF", where the PDF Output always ends up in your desired directory ...
• If you want to change the quality, the dpi, the Acrobat version or the overwrite mode, you can use a righ mouse click on the FreePDF icon in the systray (which really doesn't consume any resources in idle mode).
  There you find the Multi Document Mode as well, that allows you concatenate as many printouts to one PDF file as you like.
• Have fun with this really great & free tool !

Thanks to Axel Szelepusa from Realtech/Germany for this tip !