PDFCreator

PDFCreator is an application for converting documents into Portable Document Format (PDF) format on Microsoft Windows operating systems. It works by creating a virtual printer that prints to PDF files, and thereby allows practically any application to create PDF files by choosing to print from within the application and then printing to the PDFCreator printer. It was first released in Germany in 2004.

In addition to PDFCreator Free, there are three business editions with additional features: PDFCreator Professional, PDFCreator Server and PDFCreator Terminal Server.

Implementation

The application is written in Microsoft C# and released to the public at no charge. It works with 64-bit Windows versions including Windows 11. The actual PDF generation is handled by Ghostscript, which is included in the setup packages.

Besides being installed as a virtual printer, PDFCreator can be associated with .ps files to manually convert PostScript to PDF format.

PDFCreator can convert to the following file formats: PDF (including PDF/A (PDF/A-1b, PDF/A-2b and PDF/A-3b) and PDF/X (X-3:2002, X-3:2003 and X-4)), PNG, JPEG, TIFF, TXT. It also allows to digitally sign PDF documents.

PDFCreator allows any COM-enabled application to make use of its functionality. The business editions of PDFCreator allow users to write their own C# scripts with access to the entire job data. These custom scripts can be integrated directly before and after the conversion. They have full access to the .NET Framework and can reference compatible external libraries.