7 Best Tools To Print To PDF (From The Web)

[KynloStephen66515]

What’s the best PDF printer for Windows? We checked 7 of the most popular options to find out.
It’s kind of shocking that printing in Windows 8 doesn’t come with a PDF option; Mac and Linux users have had this by default for years. Windows users still need dedicated software, and it’s all of varying quality.

PDF printers let you save any file you can print as a PDF, meaning that any computer on Earth can open it without much trouble. Because these programs disguise themselves as regular printers, you can use them to create a PDF file in any program that lets you print. We’ve shown you how to print to PDF on Windows 8, but such software is by no means new: you can use it on any version of Windows.

Read Full Story: http://www.makeuseof.com/tag/7-best-tools-print-pdf/

[tomos]

Been using PDFCreator for years and can recommend it.
http://www.pdfforge.org/

Pros:
# you can make PDFs up to publication standard on this (yes I've successfully sent stuff to press)
# great control over options
# it has gracefully managed graphics that even Acrobat struggled with (YMMV)

Cons:
# Terrible interface (although they've just introduced a completely new/different version that I havent yet tried)
# trys to install crapware (from that article, it sounds like it's not the worst)


I see PrimoPDF also makes pre-press PDFs, must have a look

[wetsmellydog]

Chrome browser has a print to PDF function that I use to capture web sites.  Open Office/Libra Office has the function built in. CutePDF writer works great too for everything else.

[KynloStephen66515]

Chrome browser has a print to PDF function that I use to capture web sites.  Open Office/Libra Office has the function built in. CutePDF writer works great too for everything else.

This is for more generic PDF creation...Not entirely sure who it is aimed at in specific but I imagine it is very helpful for those who just want to hit the print button rather than hoping software X has the feature built in.

[IainB]

Is printing to PDF really an issue nowadays? I hadn't thought it was, and I don't see why "It’s kind of shocking that printing in Windows 8 doesn’t come with a PDF option...". The PDF (Portable Document Format) seems to have been an innovative and successful de facto - albeit arguably constipated - proprietary standard, created by Adobe to corner a market niche. A move that that has no doubt made them pots of money. I did think that, at one point, MS might have been attempting to dominate this niche, with their (rather good) proprietary MDI format, but that seems to have rather fizzled out. Mind you, I thought they had already won the war with their machinations in the XML battles - leading to the OpenDocument Text (.odt) format.
In my view, there is no big deal about printing to PDF, and, like @tomos, I use the excellent PDFCreator (have done for years) - when I want output in PDF from an application that does not natively support it. The latter point is important because many applications do natively support it. For example, in my $10 copy of Microsoft Office 2013, Word can not only open a PDF document as a pretty decent Word document for editing, but also it can save a document in PDF, with all sorts of useful options, as per the screenshot below:

[attach]

[cchian]

For this I often use PrintFriendly (http://www.printfriendly.com/), it allows you to clean and format web pages before you save page as PDF (You can also print or email the page). URL links are also preserved which is something I wanted.

[Lutz_]

Not mentioned in the "makeuseof" list is PDF24 - my favorite.   Free, easy to use, no crapware installed, it does not bug me permanently with annoying updates (some others try all over again to install the crapware - e.g. PDFcreator), plenty of options (e.g. printing to picture files).

http://en.pdf24.org

[Joe Hone]

I use CutePDFWriter, #2 on the list in the screenshot above. I like it because it is small and captures any document as a PDF. It can also capture protected PDFs (i.e. no print function) from websites by right clicking the image, clicking print and selecting CutePDFWriter in the printer box. It has saved me big time when I need copies of regulations or codes for future reference but the government site doesn't allow for printing.

[HankFriedman]

PriPrinter is the true champ in this arena.

It captures printing from PC programs and from the web, and allows you to format and edit it, save it to PDF, with incredibly power and versatility.

I've evaluated many PDF printing utilities, and this is by far the best!

[Steven Avery]

PriPrinter is on Bits today. However only the Standard, which I think does not have the PDF feature.