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"We were unsurprised to learn today that someone has just posted the entire new Harry Potter book on the PDF hosting site Scribd.  That's part of the appeal of these sites, of course: fast, free PDF sharing.  The desktop and web tools that went before aren't so simple, and not all of them are free.  But while Adobe Acrobat (US$449) still reigns supreme, there are plenty of other ways to rip, mix and burn your PDFs.\nRIP PDFs ONLINE\n\n\n\n\nAdobe's Create PDF Online takes your file in a number of formats (MS Office, RTF, AutoCAD) or will take a whack at OCR (optical character recognition) of your scanned docs. Pick your shots with this super-service, you only get five before they start asking for money.\nBCL Technology's PDF Online takes almost anything you'll feed it and emails it back as a PDF.\nESP's PDF-o-matic takes web pages and turns them into PDFs, handy for offline viewing or integrating into papers or presentations.\nNeevia's online PDF masher offers fine control of settings like image resolution and PDF version compatibility.\nPDF4U is unlimited in quantity but limited in size. As in, 35K. So don't attempt to send them your 5,000 page illustrated history of the avocado.\nSanface offers Text2PDF, which takes text pasted into a window and PDFs it right there.\nThen there's DrawLoop's Loop Service that swallows your Word docs, Excel, PDFs and the rest and spits out a single PDF.\nZamzar will convert any document to just about any other format\u2014including PDF.\nDESKTOP RIPPING\n\n\n\n\nGhostscript is the venerable old-skool PDF hack. It's been around for years, and it's free.  Caveat: Not for the faint-hearted, this is a classic engineer's dream that will seem as user-friendly as DOS to some people.\nSoftland's doPDF is a free printer driver that hooks into Windows and makes PDFs from any app that has a print command.\nPDF995's been around for years, powering its decent\u2014for free, at least\u2014tools by sticking ads in them.  Lots of users means lots of stability, for what it's worth.\nDid you know that OS X creates PDFs for nothing, Mac users? Check out your print dialog box.\nGoogle Docs has a save-as-PDFfunction, too, and offers simple routes to sharing.\nSo does Microsoft Windows, but it's a download because Adobe and Microsoft got in a little legal pushy-shove over Big Bad Bill including a free PDF-maker as a part of the operating system.\nActivePDF's PrimoPDF is pretty great for a free PDF toaster.\nDownload MyPDFCreator, which boasts about its robust security settings.\nCutePDF Writer is just that\u2014and free, too.\nDitto the free part with SourceForge's PDF Creator .\nGlobal Graphics' Jaws PDF Creator probably has the most street cred of the Acrobat alternative apps.\nNitro PDF by Australian software developers Arts PDF is an up-and-coming competitor to Jaws.\nDon't forget good old OpenOffice, which can toast documents into PDF.\nNuance's PDF Converter does cost some bread, but it opens up a lot of cool features you never knew you couldn't live without (gives your right-clicking ring finger more PDF power than you thought was possible).\ne-PDF Converter purports to do a lot of the same things in its various iterations.\nSmart PDF Converter is yet another choice.\nDocuDesk's deskPDF claims to work with 300 different apps, including some pretty heavy graphics tools.\nBluebeam PDF Revu costs more than most desktop apps not named Acrobat, but its hooks into Office save time and clicks.\nAt one point, Larry Page lobbied for putting the thinner Foxit Reader in the Google Pack mobile utilities download, but the team convinced him that Adobe Reader was a better fit. For a lot of people, this company's PDF tools are where price meets performance.  The company's Text Viewer utility extracts text into editable files.\nSowedoo's EasyPDF Converter makes lightweight, Web-ready PDFs on the cheap.\nCT Developing's PDFTypewriter is a mature (read: stable) Acrobat alternative that also can collect data from your online forms and run them to databases.\nMIX YOUR PDFs\n\n\n\n\nCT's free PDF Text Reader extracts text from PDF files for editing and reuse in your blogs or wherever else.\nPDF U Append takes all those single documents (i.e. web pages PDF'd in PDF-o-matic, above) and merges them into one file.\nABBYY PDF Transformer opens a PDF and allows the unthinkable: editing!\nApago's claim to fame is PDF Shrink and PDF Optimizer, which throw out all the junk in a PDF file to make it thin-as-possible for uploading to the Web\u2014but they've recently expanded their line of widgets to do more.\nArts PDF's PDF Linker plugs in to Acrobat and checks links and bookmarks, a painful manual process for long or short-complicated PDFs.\nPDF2Text converts PDF to text or XML files.\nVeryPDF's Advanced PDF Tools lets you tweak many settings in a document, from page orientation to how it opens and metadata (i.e. you can stash \"Paris Hilton nude\" in this hidden data field and amp up your document's download numbers).\nProtect your PDF content by stamping your logo\u2014or anything else\u2014on every page with PDF-Tools' Batch Stamp Tool.\nIf anyone who is blind or otherwise visually impared will read your document, read Adobe's accessibility  tutorials for good advice on design and formatting that makes it easier for that audience to consume your content whether or not you're using Acrobat to toast your PDFs.\nBURN PDFs\n\n\n\n\n\nScribd (\"scribed\") wants to be the YouTube of document sharing. PDF insiders also know that the site is a good hack for making quality files for free because it offers one-document-at-a-time access to Cadillac Adobe server software.\nYouScript is a social network for Hollywood writers and wannabes sharing their scripts, mostly. But anyone can use it for their own devices.\n4Shared offers free space and PDF document-sharing access.\nDriveHQ offers sharing as one of its many services, including online backup.\nMy Docs Online is a subscription service with no maximum file-upload restriction.\n\n\nSee also:\nWeb Design Toolbox: 50+ Tools for Web Design30+ Plugins for Wordpress Comments50+ Tools For TorrentingONLINE MEDIA GOD: 400+ Tools for Photographers, Videobloggers, Podcasters &amp; MusiciansOnline Maps: 50+ Tools and ResourcesWork Together: 60+ Collaborative Tools for GroupsONLINE PRODUCTIVITY GOD: 400+ Resources To Make You Smarter, Faster &amp; a Demon in the Sack30+ AJAX-Powered WordPress Plugins70+ Tools For Job Hunting 2.040+ Firefox Add-ons for High Speed Blogging20 Ways To Aggregate Your Social Networking ProfilesOnline Music: 90+ Essential Music and Audio WebsitesPodcasting Toolbox: 70+ Podcasting Tools and ResourcesBlogging Toolbox: 120+ Resources for Bloggers14 Personalized Homepages Compared, Feature by Feature230+ Keyboard Shortcuts for Top Web ServicesOnline Photography Toolbox: 90+ Online Photography Tools and ResourcesVideo Toolbox: 150+ Online Video Tools and ResourcesOnline Productivity Toolbox: 30+ Resources to Get Things DoneThe Ultimate RSS Toolbox - 120+ RSS ResourcesAnalytics Toolbox: 50+ Ways to Track Website TrafficGoogle vs Everyone: 10 Markets Where Google Wants to WinThe Tagging Toolbox: 30+ Tagging ToolsWiki Toolbox: 30+ Wiki Tools\n"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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