Creating PDFs - a reader's suggestion

One of our readers emailed to express his appreciation of a tool called PrimoPDF.  He gave permission to reproduce part of that email, which explains why he likes this product.

We use Adobe Reader 8.1, but it does not have many bells and whistles.  We use the 2003 versions of MS Word and Outlook.  I like the PrimoPDF because it is easy.  Once it is downloaded, PrimoPDF shows up as one of the printers on the “print” dialog box.  You choose it as your printer and “print.”  It then asks for the output file name, and it gives you 4 choices for output quality ranging from “Screen” (basic) to “Prepress” (best), plus a custom option.  For my purposes, I use the “screen” quality, which prints out as clearly as most attorneys would ever need.  There are other bells and whistles which I haven’t needed yet.  The whole process takes maybe 15 to 20 seconds.  I use it to save documents and e-mails that I don’t want to be changed.

PrimoPDF is a free download, and works with Windows Vista.  Of course, I always recommend that lawyers spring for the full version of Acrobat 8.0, which allows PDF creation as well as many other things such as bates-stamping and document redaction (to name just a few things).  It's not free, but you can download a fully functioning version and try it for 30 days.

If you can't afford Acrobat, and need to convert documents to PDF, then PrimoPDF is a good place to start.  Start archiving all of your outgoing letters to PDF.  Eventually, you'll want to get a scanner and the full version of Acrobat, but at least you've taken one important step on the road to becoming completely paperless.

Do you have any good tips on using PDFs in your practice that you'd like to share with other readers of this blog?  Well send 'em in, and we'll post those tips next Friday.  Thanks!