The printing money-pit

to Adobe Reader’s commenting tools at www.tinyurl.com/pdferdrxi .

Adobe’s own Acrobat software has long been the choice of professionals needing to create or edit PDFs, due to its advanced security and collaboration features. It’s quite pricey software though.

If you just need the ability to create PDF files from other documents you’ve already made, try PrimoPDF at www.primopdf.com.

Click “Download Free” under the “Try Primo” section on the left – don’t confuse it with the Nitro PDF trial on the right. Run the download to install PrimoPDF. When you want to create a PDF file, simply “print” the document by clicking File > Print in your application, but select the PrimoPDF “printer” instead of your usual one.

Choose a location on your PC to save your PDF file and Primo will create it in seconds.

FRIEND HOWoften do you print something off the web only to find there are adverts, pictures or unnecessary text you don’t need tagged on at the end, wasting ink and paper?

A handy web service called PrintFriendly at www.printfriendly.com cleans web pages for a leaner print experience, free of adverts and similar web page junk.

Just paste the URL (web address) of the web page you want to print, and PrintFriendly generates the “friendly” version. Handy options allow you to Print, download as PDF or email the cleaned content. BATCH printing, or regular repetitive printing of lots of files, is a little tedious if you have to open and print each one individually.

A handy tool, Print Conductor, from www.print-conductor.com, is free for personal use and lets you dump a selection of files (most popular formats are supported) into a print queue.

Print Conductor will then set about printing them in the order specified. You can save the list of documents and simply open this again whenever you need them printed.

It’s admittedly a niche requirement, but a useful utility if this is something you do regularly. Try it out, but remember you will need to purchase a license for the program if you use it at the office.

ECO

DO YOU ever wish you could quickly re-hash a website or document you’re about to print to make it fit on fewer sheets of paper? The trouble is, you often only realise how wasteful the output will be after it’s too late and you’ve already printed it.

Print Eco from www.printecosoftware. solves this problem elegantly by integrating with Microsoft’s Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook programs, as well as the Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers.

Simply choose PrintEco from the program’s File Menu and the software will create an optimised output for you, automatically reducing wasted “white space” to help you fit more on each printed page. You can preview and tweak the output to save paper, ink or both before printing.

The multi-slide printing options for PowerPoint are especially useful. I find printing PowerPoint slides, notes or entire presentations often wastes loads of paper by printing a single item per page. Print Eco’s “Basic” version is free, but adds some unobtrusive adverts alongside the Print Eco software’s functions. Alternatively, the ad-free Premium version is just $4.99 for a lifetime license.