Ease of Use & Installation

With most software that I receive for review I first try to document its simplicity. This is accomplished by using what many might call the "male approach" or not reading any of the instructions. I just jump in head first and see how far I can go before any help reference is needed. Installation of each product was accomplished quite easily without any errors, caveats, or need for documentation review. Double clicking on the program icon (as with most Windows products) guides you step-by-step through the installation process with no idiosyncrasies noticed.

Inside pdfFactory Pro

First of all let me state pdfFactory is not a PDF editor! It is a tool that functions in the respect of a printer driver that allows for flexible conversions of your documents to a PDF file format and does possess a number of formatting capabilities. Let's take a look.

Fig 1. pdfFactory Pro Installed as a Printer Driver

As depicted in the image above pdfFactory Pro installs as a printer driver on your system. Once installed the user simply opens a document that he/she wishes to convert to the PDF format and prints it to pdfFactory Pro without choosing any properties.

Fig 2. Preview Screen with Jobs Tab

The user is then presented with a preview screen which contains not only your document in PDF format, but a plethora of options you may select from to enhance your document's presentation. You'll also notice the "Job" tab settings are listed along with the number of pages the formatted PDF file contains. Here you can also open other documents in the form of other jobs and combine multiple jobs into a single PDF document.

Fig 3. Fonts Tab and Options

The "fonts" tab allows the user to control what fonts from their original document are embedded in the PDF file. This can be quite useful as some fonts tend to view better in PDF than others.

Fig 4. Doc info Tab and Options

The "Doc Info tab" names the job that you are viewing and allows the user to add additional descriptive information such as the subject of your presentation and key words it contains. Additionally it provides a number of "Acrobat Viewer Options" which can serve to enhance your document and better showcase it to your readers. Each option is totally self explanatory with the outcome of each being immediately applied to your document in the preview window.