Programs to create PDF

A program with various utilities: PDF printer, image printer and PDF editor.

We are going to analyze a program called PDFill, which serves as a PDF printer and also has other more or less useful features that we are also going to describe.

Originally we have known about this program as a result of one of its functionalities: the printing of documents from Windows programs in PDF files. In .com we had already commented about other PDF printers, but in this case PDFill also allows us to print documents in images (with support for various graphic formats).

A PDF printer is a program that, once installed, configures a virtual printer on our system. From any Windows program that allows printing, by selecting said virtual printer, you can dump the result of printing the document into a PDF file. Said PDF is generated with the content as it would be printed on the printer. PDF printers are one of the simplest tools to generate PDF files from any Windows document such as a text file, web page, etc. and its use is as simple as selecting the print option of any program.

In the specific case of the program at hand, PDFill has the particularity that, apart from allowing the creation of PDF files with the print result, it has the option of converting the print to one or more images in various formats, such as gif, jpg, tif, bmp or png. The result of the images that are created is the document itself, just as it would appear on a normal printer, generating as many separate images as there are pages in the document when printed. It is undoubtedly a useful tool that is original, at least for me, since I did not know it in other PDF printers.

PDFill is a paid product in its full version, but the tools that we are reporting, to print in PDF or image, can be downloaded for free and are free to use. The download URL is

PDFill configuration possibilities

But the truth is that PDFill has also surprised me by the configuration possibilities of the resulting file, being able to select topics such as PDF optimization, the possibility of including watermarks, use of a password to protect it if desired, rotation of the content to be printed , etc. The truth is that the number of options that can be configured is surprising, some of them a bit strange or strange, but in general they can be useful depending on our needs. When it comes to creating images from the printed document, it also has various configuration options, in this case specific to the particularities of each of the graphic output formats that it supports. For example, if we choose the jpg image format, it allows us to select its quality, as well as other details such as resolution.

PDFill PDF printer and PDF editor

The program is free, so we can enjoy a PDF printer with great configurability, which can be very useful for generating PDF files that can then be easily published or distributed by email. But it should be commented that the original purpose of PDFill is not the possibility of generating PDF files or images from the printing of documents, but that it really is a PDF editor that contains data to be filled in forms. There are some PDFs that contain forms to fill out, with PDFill we can fill in the fields and then print the complete form with the data, or even save it on our computer. I could say that this functionality of PDFill isn’t really the one I find most useful, because I’ve never had to fill out a PFD form and then save it, so the parts of the program that have interested me the most are what they call “Free PDF Writer” and the “Free Image Writer”, recounted earlier in this .com web development article. In fact, these very attractive components are those that are offered for free, as a hook, and the part of the PDF editor has a cost to acquire a license to use.

To finish, I leave an image with the PDFill interface, which appears when printing a document and selecting the virtual PDF printer that the program installs.